A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  She was too young for names or definitions of this relationship. She did not even give much thought to it in terms of the much-debased coinage of the word “love”, which despite the devastating current abuse, one is compelled to use, because it has no substitute or alternative. Love was so taken for granted that it had not even been uttered, because the relationship, in her own intuition, felt like something quite new in the chronicles of life and time. Young as she was she had no doubt that never in real life, never even in literature, and she had read far more than most young women of her age, never in the ultimate of legend and myth, could there ever have been anything to match what fate had given her and François to share between them. She had no urge or desire to define it or make conceptualised thought or philosophy out of it, only the deepest and clearest of feelings derived from an unshakeable conviction that their relationship, their total coincidence of being, was utterly unique and that it just would have to be lived. If it were not lived, life and the world would be the poorer for it. So always at the end of the day as at the beginning, indeed often in the middle of the night amid some terrible dream, the final thought always was for François, and, if at all for herself, only in so far as it prompted François’s well-being and his relationship to life. And she could truly feel within the emerging woman in herself, that in so far as love had to be brought into an argument that was settled in her heart before it started, if she acknowledged a love for François, she loved him not for herself but on behalf of life.

  This, somehow, even in her darkest moments, when it seemed that her body and mind had become a new invincible despotism of pain, the flame and fire of the feeling arrested the power of, if it did not abolish, the ice-age of sickness and darkness creeping into her physical well-being. At once she would know that, however much her body might want to fall out of the march of life, the sense of a great universal necessity working through her and François would bear her up so that she could pursue to a true and full end what life had originally intended by bringing them with such a mysterious symmetry together, and that one day yet it would be fulfilled, sheer like lightning, without reservation or compromise. She would snuggle up closer to him and Hintza, feeling that in life summed up thus, the three of them were at one, and like the desert stars bright and resounding above their fire, they were set in a lawful course of their own that nothing could arrest and deny.

  After such a night François would know that he was even closer to Nonnie. Just the merest touch of her skin startled him with its message, as if one skin enclosed them both. And his being closer to her, to Nuin-Tara and to Xhabbo, sustained him when away alone hunting. He would remember the physical nearness of Nonnie and the look of trust with which Xhabbo would always watch him go in the morning. It was the same look Xhabbo had given him the day he rescued him from the lion-trap. It was a look François had seen elsewhere only in Hintza and the animals who had never before looked into the eyes of other men. He remembered Mopani telling him about this very look that one sees, as he put it, “only in the virgin eyes of the children of nature. It is a look one must never betray, little cousin.”

  He could almost hear the beloved voice itself there in the desert where he walked alone: “One can perhaps betray oneself if one must, and hope some time for pardon from life, and one can betray the men of the twentieth century because they have all betrayed one another for so long that they have some kind of terrible immunity to betrayal. But for people of nature and animals and birds still capable of such a look, there is no such immunity, and betrayal is death to them as it is ultimately to the betrayer.”

  Intangible as all these feelings and intimations and recollections were, they did François more good than any amount of medicine, ammunition or the help of others could have done. Once they were recognised, welcomed and made at home in his daily reckoning, he would be reassured, composed and more resolute. And he would come back, tired as he was, night after night, with whatever little of food he had gathered from the desert, eagerly looking forward to seeing those dear, trusting faces, dismayed though he would be by noticing again how ill and thin they looked, asking only that they should open their eyes and show him that the ancient, first look of trust was still there.

  The detail of every evening was stored up accordingly in his memory as a new source of wealth and daily he would hasten back, spurred on by a feeling of going “home”, however strange it may sound in a desert where no one had a fixed home, where home was not in any given place but in the feeling of being at home anywhere in the universe, by instant right of the fact that one is a child of it and the life it lit on earth.

  He was helped in this by a new kind of sunset. He had never seen sunsets with such a range of colour. It was amazing how so stark and uncompromising a wasteland produced such tender colours and such delicacy of tone to accompany the dying sun, as if nature were entering through them a plea for forgiveness to the parched and wounded earth that had suffered under it all day long. And François was deeply moved, for the earth seemed instantly to respond and become alive with compassion, gracing the last aftermath of colour with the first fall of its own special benediction of dew.

  There was one sunset when he saw his first hills on the horizon, and his heart soared like a bird; not only because a heart that has been nourished for so long only on desert levels flew by reflex of the spirit after the swift, god-like flight of physical vision to the hill-tops, but also because Xhabbo had told him, “When you feel your eyes feeling themselves full of hills, feel yourself utterly to be near the sea.”

  Those first hills were of a startling, precise and yet midnight blue, announcing in their almost melodramatic outlines that the thrusting desert wave of earth in seach of form had come to an end, and that an ordered pattern of land and stone would now contain, fashion, and give it the definition it lacked before. And when the sun went down behind them, it left the landscape in between filled with the scarlet light that was the blessed light of the great Heitse-Eibib himself, and François walked on a yellow beach as it were of sand, under a Hottentot copper sky with a sea of light like blood breaking over it to send foam and spume of itself to drift a mist of gold before his smarting eyes. Nothing could have been a better omen on the threshold of the night.

  The next day the desert, soft with sand and lush by comparison with bush, scrub and plant, fell away behind them and the earth stretched far and wide on all sides of them, lean and with nowhere any fat to be seen on it. They passed slowly between the hills and Nuin-Tara helped Xhabbo up that night to show him the sun, first a bright yellow and then red on the greatest of the hills. Xhabbo somehow managed to greet it firmly with his most reverent salute before he told François that it was good. That was the hill where the Bushman God had first discovered fire, to give it to the people of the early race. If François looked at it, at that moment as he, Xhabbo, was looking, he would see how the hill and even the ring of ironstone around its crown was burning with everlasting fire.

  They struggled on and on, the next day and the next, until the hills all vanished, and they were suddenly back in a desert of dunes, but dunes that dwarfed the dunes behind them. They were dunes of pure sand with no plant of any kind upon them. The sand was so deep at their base that it was only with the greatest difficulty that he and Nuin-Tara could manage to get Nonnie and Xhabbo to stagger on through the day. François feared that if they had to go on much longer in this world of sand their water would give out and since the strength of his partners was declining so fast and they were moving so slowly, they might be unable to reach a source of replenishment. Yet significantly neither Nuin-Tara nor Xhabbo were dismayed. On the contrary they smiled at him and for the first time announced, “We feel ourselves to be near to where we are going.”

  Towards evening they found a pass between two mountain dunes, the equivalent of Everest and Annapurna in desert terms. On their towering crests, curved and curling like two waves raised by a great typhoon, they saw from the narrow trough in between, the wind of evening
driving a spume like smoke from their tips and heard a strange singing rise up on the still, tender and darkening air. Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara clapped their hands and exclaimed, “Listen, oh listen, and feel how they are singing to the singing and dancing sea!”

  After a struggle too long and too painful to be cabable of comprehension in some soft-chaired moment safe in a room of amber, where it might be declared beyond human possibility, they passed out of this winding valley of sand. They emerged suddenly on the banks of a broad fragment of a dry river-bed, like a kind of valley-meadow, though their horizon was still a ring of more great dunes. François suddenly saw with unbelieving eyes, a flash of shining kingfisher blue beyond a river bank and a wide pool of water lined with bulrushes. He was startled by the song of birds singing one of the sweetest songs ever heard by deprived ears. He and Nuin-Tara hastened to prepare their camp before the sun finally set, because Nonnie and even Xhabbo were speechless, and so grey and thin that François feared that they might die there and then, if they were not instantly rested and fed.

  At that precise moment Nuin-Tara told François with a lift of even her stoical voice that they had “arrived” and that in the morning, he would have to cross the dune in front, see the sea and then follow the shore away to the north-west to where the way of the wind ended on the great water wherein it was born. By noon he ought to reach the place of people who come out of the sea. It was known to the Bushmen as “The Place of Chains”, because so many Bushmen for a century or more had been taken away bound to that place, never to return. But as François too was a child of the people who come out of the sea, the place would be good to him and he would find the help he wanted.

  The feelings roused in François by this pronouncement were so violent and the prospect so dazzling that his own exhausted senses were at once a mixture of intoxication and unbelief. He had counted and added up carefully every day from their first encounter with the tsetse fly. He took out his dispatch book and stood there with the twilight wrapped round him, opening it slowly and studying it like some apprentice alchemist his ultimate formula. Yes, he was not drunk with hope. It was exactly one hundred, thirty-seven and a half days since the first tsetse fly attack.

  Immediately he bounded like an impala to where Nonnie and Xhabbo had already been made comfortable side by side in front of a newly lit fire. Stabbing at the pages in front of him with trembling fingers, he exclaimed, savage with exaltation, “Nonnie! Xhabbo! Do you know, it’s taken only a hundred and thirty-seven and a half days to get here! Only one hundred, thirty-seven and a half days!”

  Nonnie opened eyes that hurt. After that terrible struggle through the thick sand and heat, aching and weak, she might have been forgiven for not taking in the import of his message as quickly as she would normally have done. Indeed she managed to give a plausible appearance of having failed to do so. Yet she reacted as she did ultimately because any sign that the deliberate François of their journey could be so impulsive with light and joy as he now was, made her so happy that she just had to balance her feelings with a pretence of detached and affectionate mockery, for she exclaimed, “Is that all? Only one hundred, thirty-seven and a half days? Dear God, I thought it had been much, much longer . . .”

  “But, Nonnie . . .” François, disconcerted, was his most vehement self and about to protest at length, but the warm look in her hurt eyes corrected him. A tremendous feeling of quite undeserved gratitude rose up like a fountain in him. Humbled and overawed by all they had been allowed to come through, as he was convinced now that they had done, he remarked in a voice low and reverent for him, “You see, Nonnie, it’s just over four months. It’s well within the limit of six that the illness sets us. You see, by tomorrow night, if all goes well, I shall have help. There’s no reason on earth now why in a few weeks you and Xhabbo shouldn’t be well and not a bit the worse for the infection.”

  Nonnie quickly turned over to hide her head in her arm, so that François should not see how the tears prompted by such a complex of emotions, smarted in her eyes. She was glad that Xhabbo’s electric voice broke the silence to distract François. Gravely, and in the most appropriate of Bushman metaphors he was saying that he had never doubted that his Foot of the Day would bring them to this place; this place in particular which as every Bushman child knew, was the place where their father Mantis had always come in times of trouble. Foot of the Day would remember the many stories of how their father Mantis when in peril, when life seemed to have come to the end even for a god like him, as for instance when he was set upon and nearly killed by the “persons who sit on their heels”, and on many, many other occasions of anguish and near extinction of which Xhabbo had no time now to speak, he had always gone to a place of water and reeds and rushes where birds sang in the desert and in the water there, had made himself whole again. This, Xhabbo announced, was that very place.

  François’s feeling of having come through swelled into a transcendent emotion of resolution, exalted by this proclamation of the magical associations Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo had with the place. In consequence they all slept more calmly and deeply than they had done for many, many weeks.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Hunter’s Testament

  FRANÇOIS AND HINTZA were the first to wake because of the birds by the pool announcing the day. He got up quietly and sat on the edge of the bank, and watched the dawn break over the yellow dunes, singing a high soprano to the invisible and at that hour remotely audible and constant bass of the singing and surging sea. The yellow dunes had a presence, almost a personality, so powerful that even the shadows where he sat were somehow made golden by them. The sky above was a piercing blue with a shining lacquer of black in the west. The light in the east was scarlet, the tops of the dunes themselves smoking white in the morning wind and the air in between soon had a magic lantern glow. He watched weaver birds coming out of the nests they had woven so beautifully round the tips of the tallest bulrushes that their weight made them bow their heads to the sacred pool. The birds themselves looked so normal and busy that he could not help smiling a “good-morning” to them as if they were good middle-class citizens opening up house for the day. Then, looking into the water which had become a delicate Chinese painting on silk with reflections of tall reeds, their tassels, nests and birds and colours of dawn, he remembered how fevered and parched Nonnie had been the night before.

  He went quietly back to their camp to fetch all their dixies, rinsed them out thoroughly by the water where his own reflection and Hintza’s lay as if in a mirror. So long was it since he had seen himself in a cool, objective frame that he was amazed to recognise himself in the water, and had an odd sense of a return to reality, almost as if until then he had doubted whether all that had happened, had really happened to the person called François.

  He filled the dixies and went back to Nonnie, who had just woken up. He took his kerchief and made her sit up and delicately sponged her face, neck, shoulders, arms, hands and feet again and again, until she declared that she had experienced nothing more wonderful on the whole of their journey, and was already completely cured.

  Something of her old, bright, spirited manner flashed in her. She looked out of fever blurred eyes at him to say, “I think after this, François, you can consider yourself to have entered an order that poor old Fa always longed to get into, but never succeeded. Regard yourself fully invested as a Knight Commander of the Bath.”

  François helped Nuin-Tara to do the same for Xhabbo. Then, once he had eaten, took his rifle and haversack. He left his ammunition pouches because his last seven bullets were in the magazine. He told them he would not be long, that is, long by their reckoning of time. He would be back by evening or early the next morning, without fail. He was rewarded with such a look, not of hope or anticipation but absolute certainty that he would be as good as his word, that he almost feared it might be too provocative of fate.

  He quickly embraced Nonnie and gave Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara their own salute of farewell. Then, without waiti
ng, eager to be better than his word, went fast on the way Nuin-Tara had told him he had to go. Just below the crest of the first dune, he looked back. The smoke of their fire was growing tall and straight like a royal palm tree in the still air. Nuin-Tara was installed beside it and within touch of her hand were two still shadows in the shadow of the bank where they sheltered, no doubt those of Nonnie and Xhabbo, lying near each other.

  Reassured, François, with Hintza beside him, then climbed up to the crest of the dune. It forked out below him, one arm curving away to the south; the other and higher one hid his view to the north. He felt a breeze colder than any he had ever felt on his face and heard a vast, urgent murmur, swelling to a sound like the noise of a rushing river. There below him was the blue and heaving sea; a water almost as blue as the sky, so that it was difficult to tell sky and ocean apart. Below him was a wide, long yellow beach and the swell of the sea drawn towards the land by white horses, like the horses of the god of which Homer wrote in François’s beloved Odyssey, pounding over the hollow sands with flashing hooves. All along to the south where the sands were out of reach of the sea and the shining silk of the wet beach was roughly translated into the roughness of land and black rock, the beach was thickly populated with seals, walruses and masses of strange, upright and oddly clerical and dogmatic looking penguins. Over their heads, his eyes were drawn to and unbelievably uplifted by a white bird which gave him an immediate feeling of kinship, almost of inborn familiarity, although he had never seen it except in books. It was a vast bird, and did not use its enormous spread of long wings at all but just kept them fully spanned against the thrust of the breeze, to soar and re-soar apparently for the delight of it, through the resounding blue air, and at times dipping so low that the spume blown from the white manes of the horses of the sea smoked over its wings. He knew he was seeing for the first time an albatross, the lone white hunter and great slayer of big ocean distances. He wanted to stay to enjoy the exhilarating sight and the new taste of life raised by the scene in his senses but the one desperate pre-occupation of months’ standing, made him turn abruptly and go back over the northern shoulder of the dune.