A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  Within moments, the others following him, they reached the outer edge of the papyrus wall to find a moat of star-filled water between them and the castle of shadow. But fifty yards to their right a broad causeway of earth had been artificially flung across the diamond water to connect the forest of trees with the mainland. Some hundred yards behind the causeway, just slightly over and behind the raised brow of the island, flickered the tips of many fires and, outlined against their glow the hoods of many military trucks. By the edge of the water there was a dark shape, obviously that of the lone singer, now singing almost as if to herself.

  Xhabbo beckoned Nonnie forward and immediately she was whispering loudly in Portuguese across the water, “I say, I say . . . can you hear me? I say!”

  The singing, now almost a kind of crooning, went on. Nonnie repeated herself twice, each time slightly louder, before the singing stopped. They heard a gasp as of shock from the singer. Nonnie was certain the singer had heard and waited, her heart thumping loud in her ears, for an answer but, as none came, she whispered in a more urgent tone, “Please answer! Don’t be afraid. I am Portuguese myself and am with friends, and we want to help.”

  There was no doubt that the singer had heard Nonnie again but apparently did not believe what she was hearing, for Nonnie heard her crying to herself, “Oh no! Dear Mother in Heaven, no! This is too cruel . . . this is the final depravity!”

  “No, no, it’s not cruel at all, it’s true. I am Portuguese and I want to help. Who are you? Please don’t be afraid, and speak to me!”

  The singer, if not entirely convinced this time, was moved enough to test the reality of that voice in her own tongue, coming out of the dark, and called, somewhat less loudly than Nonnie, in a tentative, trembling voice, “If you are not the voice of madness and are truly not deceiving me, then I am Maria Henrietta d’Alveira, a captured Portuguese woman and a prisoner here. Do you hear me?”

  “Oh yes, I hear you clearly,” Nonnie, thrilled at the response, answered almost too loud for safety. “You are Maria Henrietta d’Alveira and please go on, but hurry, so that we can help.”

  Quickly and this time more confidently the woman warned, “For God’s sake be careful. There are a hundred soldiers and two thousand tribesmen who have come to hear me sing on the other side of the island. If I stop for long, some of them will be here to see why, and see that I go on doing my duty. But who are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter who we are,” Nonnie retorted, “all that can come later. The point is, do you want to come with us? You must! Don’t speak any more . . . just come and join us, I beg you, in the name of God! We’ll get you away. I am with friends, we’re armed and we’ll protect you.”

  “Are you certain? Dear God, if only that were possible. How could you get me away from this terrible place? Oh, if only I could believe you—I’d throw myself into this water and join you at once, before those men can get hold of me again. I’ve been here nearly a year, a closely-guarded prisoner, and nearly every night I am brought out to sing by this tree. I’ve long since given up hope of getting away. I think I’m near dying, I’m not sure that I have the strength to go far, and that it would be right for me to join you. If you are prepared to help me, you must be their enemies and in as great a danger as I am, and I don’t think I can walk a mile in my state . . .”

  “Oh forget your state and your scruples!” Nonnie’s voice suddenly spoke for all the Portuguese Amelia-governesses there had ever been, out of a practical, realistic self that so often confounded François, and which the desperate situation now demanded. “And don’t bother to throw yourself in the water,” she continued. “It’s quite unnecessary. Just hurry to that causeway, cross it as fast as you can and we’ll be on the other side to meet you. But you must come at once! We’ve no time to lose. Leave the rest to us. We know all there is to know about your captors!”

  Nonnie’s tone now was so confident, and the matter-of-fact administrative ring of it was obviously the sweetest and most comforting thing the singer had heard for months.

  “Oh dear God, how wonderful,” she called back, the flood of life flowing back into her spirit, quickening the husky tone of a born fado singer.

  At once she stood up, gathering something long about her. Breaking into a new kind of song with a quickened rhythm, almost too revealing for Nonnie’s discerning ear, though probably not, she hoped, to their enemy’s, Maria Henrietta d’Alveira began to walk towards the causeway as casually as if setting out on another perfunctory round of her singing duties, while Xhabbo led the others on a course parallel to meet her. She reached the causeway with no sign of alarm from their captors. Maria Henrietta’s voice faltered, as if she were losing her nerve, and then stopped altogether, before she turned sharply in their direction and started on tiptoe across the causeway.

  She had only taken three steps forward when a suspicious sentry challenged, in Bantu English, “Who goes there? Stop, or I fire!”

  Nonnie was about to call out, “Don’t listen—run, run as you’ve never run before”—when Nuin-Tara’s hand clamped down on her mouth and prevented her speaking. It was just as well for her call would have been unnecessary. The woman broke into a run of her own accord.

  “Stop or we fire!” the sentry’s challenge rang out louder, shorter and more imperious than before. As she did not, he repeated it once more, and as she ran on he screamed rather than shouted the command: “Fire!”

  Instantly the darkness from seven different points flowered seven vivid red flashes and a rattle-tattle of automatic rifle-fire drowned any sound the woman might have uttered. Xhabbo and François, by now on the edge of the causeway, threw themselves forward to the ground, dragging down Nuin-Tara, Nonnie and Hintza in the process. Bullets whistled and droned and a storm of lead and steel beat over their heads and sent shattered papyrus tops showering down on them. When they could look again, they saw a shapeless bundle, darker than the darkness, lying still on the causeway. The automatic fire stopped and another voice, presumably that of a superior African officer, rang out.

  “Oh you fools!” Oh, you bloody, bloody fools! You’ve killed her! Now the singing tree will stop singing, and a thousand and more tribesmen here to witness it. Oh you bloody fools, you bloody, bloody fools!”

  Nonnie was struggling fiercely with Nuin-Tara on the ground. Xhabbo and François had to rush and help her persuade Nonnie that the woman was truly dead and that they must get back to the shelter of the papyrus as fast as they could. The sentries, François reasoned, would not have shot if something had not made them more than usually suspicious, so much so that they might mount a search on their side of the mainland at any moment. Nonnie, however, had no heart or ear for reason, although the will of her companions contained her for the moment. Even so, they might not have succeeded in convincing her, had not some ominous new order come out of the clamour which broke out among the soldiers as a result of their reprimand.

  The voice of the man who had given the order to fire, was protesting; “But, sah! I promise you, there was something strange going on. I would not have shot, if I did not think I heard that person talking to someone across the water.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so before, you fool?” came the impassioned retort. “Enough! I repeat, for the last time, enough of excuses, and your stupidity in shooting that woman. You’ve just spoilt years and years of careful planning. There’s going to be the most God-almighty row about this. But if you did hear people across the water, we can perhaps still stop the matter from being a worse mess than it already is.”

  Immediately the blast of a whistle, loud and long, went out over the island in the piercing way that François, Xhabbo and even Nonnie and Hintza had first heard it one dawn at Hunter’s Drift. At once, from behind the brow of that great fortress of shadow, somewhere around those fires, came the sound of a great military camp breaking into immediate action.

  Xhabbo hesitated no longer and ordered François to follow without delay, for happily the old Bushman trac
k he had originally taken passed over a secret ford on the far side of the island, and with all that noise, their chances of getting by the fire and the island garrison were at their best.

  Nonnie still protested and clamoured at François, “Oh François, we can’t leave her like that. We’re not even sure she’s dead. Oh please. . . .”

  François was more rough with her than he had ever been, because the killing had shaken him almost as much as her, and also because their danger was great. He was embroiled in an argument of his own almost as violent as Nonnie’s, upbraiding the necessity of a flight that their safety imposed on them. Accordingly he said nothing to her that he was not saying in greater measure to himself. Taking her by the shoulders, gripping them so that it hurt, and shaking her, he muttered, “Of course she’s dead, or I would not be leaving her. And will you shut up and do what you’re told or we’ll all be dead as well. Come on Hin.”

  With that, not even looking to see if she was following and so unaware that the tears were streaming from her eyes, he went as fast after the vanishing Xhabbo as possible, certain that if Nonnie faltered, Nuin-Tara would deal with her.

  The noise of the enemy organising itself for action was almost deafening, before it declined into the sound of armed and heavily booted men running over the causeway and up and along the road that led to and from the island, and in a direction which took them further away from the papyrus fringes of the swamp.

  Soon Xhabbo was back on the old Bushman track and they were on their way to the heart of the swamp, on towards the sanctuary and the prospect of freedom in the other half of the desert beyond. They could tell the contentment with which the soles of Xhabbo’s feet re-established their communion with the imprints of soles of countless vanished Bushmen feet that had made and maintained the track almost since the beginning of African time, because at once his pace became rhythmical and accelerated. The noise of the enemy, loud as it had been, quickly faded, the glow of the camp itself disappeared and the swamp and its own manifestations of being took command of the silence and the night.

  By dawn, never once having paused, they halted at last on an island fortress of trees where Nuin-Tara, raking the sandy marshland earth, disclosed to them the ashes of other Bushman fires, which gave them a wonderfully healing feeling of company.

  They were now in a world, Xhabbo said, where he had left no spoor that even a Bushman could follow and they could light a fire, prepare some food, eat and then go happily to sleep. But before they sat down François interrupted Nonnie who was going about her share of preparing camp as Nuin-Tara was. He took her hand and pleaded, “Believe me, Nonnie, I was as sad as you were to leave that Portuguese lady. But I promise you I knew she was dead and I knew that if we did not go, we’d be dead too. All the time we’ve been walking, I’ve been thinking of something else that might help you, as it’s helped me. I’m certain from what she said that she did not have long to live anyway. The swamp is full of terrible diseases. But more, I know you were right to take us to her and I am sure that she did not die for nothing. You heard how angry that officer was afterwards. He had every reason to be angry, because from what I’ve heard about the African tribes and a lot of their recruits who give the enemy so much support, they believe in the prophecy of the singing tree as you believe in the Virgin Mary and her son. With this tree suddenly silenced, they’ll take it as a sign from the great tribal spirits that the time of the fulfilment of the prophecy has not come. It might even make them realise how they have been tricked and used and turn on our enemies themselves. At the least, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, from now on, support for our enemies dwindles, on such a scale that they might be forced to withdraw.”

  Nonnie was too tender within to speak or look at him but she pressed his hand in a way that meant more than words.

  Their journey through the swamp, well-nourished on all the teeming game and bird life seemed long. They were travelling through another world, new not only to Nonnie but also to François; a world that merited acknowledgement in its own unique and rich right. Moreover, something happened on their second day after arriving in the swamp which, because of its potentially devastating impact on the future, changed the shape and character of their journey.

  They slept all day and all through the night that followed at their first camp. They did not name it because it already had an honoured name which, according to Xhabbo, it would be unlucky to change. In a rough, idiomatic translation of the complex Bushman original, it was called, “Big toe in the swamp”, being the merest of thresholds to the great world of the swamp beyond.

  On the second day they set out at a steady pace. At noon they came across an old buffalo bull asleep in the shade of a great thorn tree. Seen from amid the tall grass crackling with sunlight, and through an air white and undulating like liquid glass, the shade was black and the bull itself so dark that only Xhabbo, trained as even François was not, in the different shades of swamp shadow, knew it was the compact shape of a volcanic buffalo. For once François wished that he had a heavier rifle with him, as buffalo are notoriously hard to shoot, and so he had to try and compensate for the light calibre of his rifle by stalking the iron-clad bull, at great risk, until he was only fifteen feet away and could hear how it rumbled in its sleep. He could see plainly how tightly the eyes were shut, how deep the wrinkles made at their corners both by age and the burning impact of the fiery swamp and double-edged steel of sunlight. He noticed how the tail, even in so deep a sleep, constantly lashed the air all around his behind in order to keep off the flies and insects trying to draw blood from the sleeper. He marvelled at its massive marble horns, and the wide delicately carved nostrils glistening with health and breathing in and out as regularly as any automatic valve designed for a diver into great deeps.

  He hated to try and kill it in its sleep. Sleep, he had been taught by Mopani and ’Bamuthi, was an act of trust without reservation by man, beast, bird and plant in their contract of life with nature, and to kill any sleeping thing was like killing someone in the midst of an act of holy communion, and gained one no good will in the life to follow. One carefully woke one’s target no matter how small, and allowed the waking life which is part of death, as sleep is not, to join in the issue between one and it. But François felt he had no option. With the greatest care he aimed at the softest place just behind the shoulder blade, shot it precisely there, three times, before the bull could even be fully awake. The impact made it fall thrashing on to its side, and François had time to run in and shoot it three times more through the ear. Only then was it dead.

  Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara were exultant, because they declared that they could now settle in the place for many days, feasting and making enough biltong out of almost a ton of buffalo meat to last them for months to come. And he and François at once set about the heavy task of skinning the vast animal. After some time, pausing for breath, François suddenly noticed that Hintza was lashing the air round himself with his tail and bounding up in fits and starts to bite himself all over. Worse, he found that both Nonnie and Nuin-Tara, watching them from nearby waiting for their call to help, were constantly slapping themselves and he heard Nonnie utter an unwilling cry of pain. He soon became aware that he too was being bitten, then glanced at Xhabbo and to his horror saw that Xhabbo’s neck and shoulders were covered with a score of flies, perched there in their dress of drab, Calvinist missionary calico.

  He went dark all over as the name of the fly presented itself to his tongue with an ominous hiss, tsetse! He remembered Mopani and all his ardent reading of books on Africa, stressing how the game and people in and around the unexplored swamp were infected with “ngana”, the deadly sleeping-sickness, or trypanosomiasis, and that tsetse fly was the unflagging carrier of the disease to both humans and their cattle. There was every chance therefore that some of the flies stinging them were capable of transmitting both the animal and human varieties of the infection.

  So unforeseen had this been, even in François’s measured reckoning
, that immediately he ordered Nuin-Tara and Nonnie, in a voice near to panic, to leave the shade of the tree and sit out in the grass where the sunlight was brightest and hottest.

  They looked at him as if he were insane.

  “Look, Nonnie, this is no joke,” he told her. “These insects biting us all are tsetse flies and though they may well be as harmless as they look, there’s a chance that they may be carriers of sleeping sickness. I’m not going to let any of us take any chances. You are both to sit out there in the sun, hot as it is, because these flies hate the sunlight, and it’s the only way I can protect you. So for Heaven’s sake, be a dear and do at once as you’re told, and take Hin with you.”

  He and Xhabbo, of course, had no option but to stay where they were until they had skinned and cut up the monumental buffalo and hung the meat in strips over the branches of the thorn tree, to be dried and cured. Only then could they hasten to join the others.

  Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara were willing enough to believe him, since they both knew that the Bushmen themselves did not live in the swamp, and only used it as a safe way of travelling between the two halves of the desert, because it was known as “a land of the plenty that is death”. And as Xhabbo emphasized, they never used it at this time of year. He would not have brought them here now if there had been any other way.

  Nonnie took longer to convince because she had to have a rational explanation of why François was so perturbed, although he did all he could to lessen the impact of his original dismay by making light of it.

  “Perhaps only one in a thousand is infected,” François told Nonnie, “and with the human strain of the sickness, and at this distance from human settlements, the proportions might be even greater. But we can’t afford to take even a thousand to one chance.”

  But Nonnie in her intuitive heart was not fooled. She suspected that nothing had worried François more than this intrusion of that horribly stinging, hideously drab and fantastically persistent fly. She marked, noted and inwardly speculated all the more widely, therefore, when François suddenly changed the subject of conversation and asked Xhabbo exactly how long it would take, from where they were, to get to the sea. For once, her suspicions made her an impatient listener to the long, round-about description of what might come; how all depended on what food they could find in the desert; on the game, water and effect on the country should the rains not come, as they had not come now for twenty moons; and how all important was the fact that at every perennial waterhole ahead there were human settlements which might be occupied by friends of their common enemies and if not, certainly by enemies of Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara. All in all, that meant they could not follow the way of the wind direct as a bee would to the water or flower of its choice, but would have to travel a round-about way, weaving in and out of their main direction as best they could, so that the journey could take anything from four to eight moons.