A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  He straddled the summit and stopped short suddenly on the skyline; a thing he would never have done even a day before. He stopped, because there, in the comparative calm of the open bay, formed by a long spit of sand, he saw a fleet of warships.

  He stared hard and long at shapes exactly like illustrations in his books and counted seventeen warships in white tropical paint, swinging at anchor, all washed down, scrubbed, neat and polished so that they flashed like jewels in the morning sun. For a moment he was not at all certain that the ships were not a vision of his own starved self. Could they be part of his urgent reality? Then the feeling of conviction, from the fact that his doubt did not make them vanish, became a new kind of music, and as music made his hair and Hintza’s stand on end.

  He would have gone on staring at them, had he not suddenly noticed that between the ships and the shore, scores of very strange dark green boats, smaller and square and flat, were hurrying towards the beaches. Some of them had indeed already stuck their noses fast into the sands. Armed men with rifles, machine guns and heavy packs on their shoulders were already running fast down their broad ramps and spreading out in military formation along the beach in front of him, and beginning to advance in the most ominous and deadly fashion towards the dune on which he was standing.

  His joy in the scene went and the fear which clutched at him, after such hope, was the darkest he had yet known. For a moment he was convinced that it could only mean that their enemies were there in command as well, and about to discover him. He did not give himself time to argue that powerful as their enemies had proved to be in the past, they were hardly powerful enough to mount so great an exercise with a fleet of seventeen warships on the open sea. He forgot that he thought he had seen a white ensign flying from the greatest of the ships and the stars and stripes from another. He only remembered ’Bamuthi’s “the buck has got out of the pot”, and immediately fell flat on the sand, his own rifle in the firing position. Hintza, without prompting, lay flat on his stomach in the shadow beside him.

  But he did not go down fast enough. He had, in fact, stood there longer than he realised, enjoying the spectacle of a modern fleet of war complete with aircraft carriers, cruisers and attendant ships. The officer supervising the landing of the brigade of marines had seen him, trained his glasses on him and remarked to the man at his side with an ominous calm, “I wonder what the hell that ruddy comedian thinks he’s doing up there complete, of all things, with a dog? After all, we’ve circulated everybody in this god-forsaken place, and the magistrate has had his police out for weeks to tell everyone to keep away from this beach for a fortnight. But look, there’s that idiot walking straight into our field of fire. We’d better get him out of there, before he gets hurt.”

  He immediately detached two marines from the platoon deployed nearest him and the three of them came, at the smartest naval double to the place where François was lying invisible.

  François was without field glasses and not at all certain what it could all mean. But he was prepared to find in them another enemy, considering how many white faces had already proved to be his foes in the past. He had them lined securely in the sights of his rifle, and waited, planning what to do after he had shot them. He was determined above all not to make a break over the crest which could only result in bringing the inevitable pursuit down on his friends. But suddenly the three men stopped and began calling and waving their caps at him.

  Still he lay flat where he was and they had to come closer. It was not until they were within fifty yards of him, that he was certain that they were British, for he heard himself being addressed in English, “You sir, you over there! Will you be good enough to show yourself, and explain what you are doing?”

  Only then did François begin to believe he might have no cause to fear. He jumped to his feet, his rifle on his arm and the safety catch still released, just in case, and slowly stepped forward with Hintza no less prepared.

  The officer was already on the point of upbraiding him for his slowness in responding to the challenge, when somehow he realised that there was something in the vision before him that was most unusual. He held his peace, observant and too curious now to be angry. When finally François stood in front of him, looking in that morning light just as Nonnie had seen him, with more than a year of suffering of mind and body, hunger and fatigue, written large all over him, a face almost black with sun, as well as a strange, alert, long and burnished dog beside him, the officer was moved to wonderment. He hardly noticed that François was holding out his hand, saying politely, “Good day, sir, I am François Joubert.” In François’s upbringing, this was the polite way of introducing himself to a stranger, giving the stranger the right opening for introducing himself too. The officer had the strange English distaste of shaking hands with other men, and he took François’s with some embarrassment, responding, “Michael Featherstone, Commander, Her Majesty’s Royal Navy sir. But pray, what are you doing here and—”

  He stopped as he nearly winced under François’s grip. François had been taught that if one shook hands at all one shook them always as if one really meant it, and he was amazed at the officer’s limp response.

  “I’ve just come across the desert with my friends, and we need help desperately,” François answered in a steady, considered voice. “Can you help me please, sir?”

  And then in a few minutes the quintessence of his story was out and the marines were sent running back to the beaches to return with a yeoman of signals. Commander Featherstone at once took over the yeoman’s walkie-talkie. Characteristic of a service wherein one is given one’s first taste of command and lesson in accepting responsibility at the age of thirteen even if it is only responsibility for taking a liberty boat alongside, he had no hesitation. Despite his bland and casual exterior, he was in a hurry. While the yeoman of signals was flashing his aldis lamp to the aircraft carrier which was the flagship of the fleet, he called over his radio phone, “Featherstone calling C-in-C himself with urgent repeat urgent request for exercise to be suspended and permission to come on board.”

  The signalling on the lamp direct to the officer of the watch was an additional precaution to ensure that he could speak direct to the admiral himself. For in exactly seven minutes now the force of marines were due to advance on an imaginary enemy, esconced among the dunes, behind a barrage of live shells and rockets, to give them as realistic a feel of war as is possible in peace. As a result the exercise was suspended for the moment and within half an hour François and Hintza were being helped on to a ramp, into a landing craft full of staring marines, and out at the far end of the landing craft into the admiral’s barge itself. With the Commander by his side he was taken straight to the flagship at full speed.

  They followed Commander Featherstone up the great ship’s ladder. The ship itself was dressed with sailors, and all the sailors looked down full of curiosity at them. As they went up the ladder both François and Hintza heard what is perhaps one of the most exciting and moving of man-made sounds, the high fountain-wise pitch of a bosun’s whistle, piping an officer on board a great ship at sea. François found it inexplicably hard not to cry when he heard it. But Hintza seemed to be uplifted by it. When he saw the officer step from the gangway on deck and jump to attention to salute the quarter-deck and without the least prompting by François, he did his greatest “grandfather curtsey” as if dropping it to the greatest of baboons.

  François had more feelings than thoughts about what was happening so fast to them, and could only just hold on to the clearest thought available; he was being brought to someone who would get help quickly and so save Nonnie and Xhabbo from what for months had seemed certain death.

  The salute and curtsey over, they were rushed down a companionway, along a narrow ship’s corridor and up to the iron doorway of the admiral’s cuddy. His guide knocked and opened the door. Michael Featherstone was about to walk in when he recollected that never in naval history would an Admiral of the Fleet have had to receive so o
dd a deputation, in particular one so well armed. He knew his Admiral well and was certain that it would only be a matter of time for the Celt he inherited from a Highland mother to respond with imagination to François’s story. All that worried him was the effect of the first impressions of such an unorthodox entry in such unlikely company. For once he was uncertain.

  “I say,” he remarked in an undertone to François. “I think it might be a good idea if you parked your gun there by the door. It’s not . . . you see that of course, don’t you.”

  The single-minded François saw only enough in his embarrassed sensitivity to respond, “How kind of you.” But still, not out of obstinacy or bad manners, only years of habit, he gripped his rifle all the more firmly, determined not to be parted from it.

  The Commander-in-Chief was sitting at the head of his table. He had a map open in front of him and all round him a team of senior staff-officers. He saw a highly uncomfortable Commander step in, followed by a dog of legendary appearance and François, as one has described him, his rifle in his right hand. The Commander-in-Chief’s face was a mixture of red and tan, after forty-seven years of service at sea. He had the nose and features of an ancient Roman, with large and unusually bright, clear and acute blue eyes. Yet, trained as he was to shocks of war, sudden emergencies and nuances of crisis of all kinds, he could not help a flicker of astonishment and a reddening of even his weathered face, while wondering, “What the blazes does Featherstone think he’s up to? I hope he knows what he’s about, and has some better reason than this scarecrow for making me hold off manoeuvres.”

  The reaction was understandable, not only because of François’s unlikely appearance but because Featherstone had been unable to say much more in their curt radio exchange than that he had intelligence of an urgent and most unusual kind to justify suspension of the exercises, and was bringing the intelligence itself on board. Was it this rag-and-tatter and hollow-eyed apparition with long, blond hair like a wasteland hippie? All this and more passed through the computer of his long experience of life and men. Had it not been for a traditional concept of discipline at sea, where firmness and grace of command are regarded not only as highly compatible but essential to one another, he might have been angered by this outrageous appearance of such an intrusion. But all he did was to speak in a tightly controlled and forthright manner and tone, that could not be denied. “Now come on in, young fellow, m’lad, come in at once and explain if you can, what reason you have for holding up the South Atlantic exercises?”

  François, immune in the conviction of the all-importance of his mission, as well as in his innocence of a service world, explained at once that he did not have the time to explain. Since the massacre—and at this word all the officers looked to one another for enlightenment and sat up straighter with interest—he and his companions had travelled for more than a year across the desert and now two of them were just on the other side of that dune dying. Could the Admiral please help them by sending a message to the magistrate at that nearby place to which he had been walking in order to get help, when he had run into the marines that morning? Could he please instruct the magistrate there to send a doctor to them without delay?

  “But who are you, young man, and who are these companions?” the admiral asked, as if playing for time to test the authenticity of a messenger bearing so incredible a tale.

  “I am François Joubert from Hunter’s Drift, on the other side of the desert,” he answered, speaking faster but still clearly and firmly. “My companions are Luciana Monckton, the daughter of Sir James Archibald Sinclair Monckton, who was massacred by terrorists with my mother and all our people. She will die if you do not help us quickly, and with me too are Xhabbo . . .”

  He got no further. His audience were completely held by the unexpectedness and enormity of his statement, as well as startled when the Bushman click implicit in “Xhabbo” fell on their ears. But it was the mention of Nonnie’s father that really produced the breakthrough from incredulity into belief. The Admiral himself was the first to exclaim, “James Archibald Sinclair Monckton? Good God, you don’t mean young Jamie Monckton? He served with me in the war, and I know he’s been reported missing believed killed in Africa, for more than a year. So that was the manner of it. You must tell us more—come and sit here next to me and will someone see to it that they have something to drink and eat immediately. They both look as if they can do with it.”

  And then the whole background of what he had been referring to was plain in under fifteen minutes of quick and highly condensed telling. From then on all the readiness to help from a service that is always prepared and rejoices in helping even more in peace than in war, was there in over-abundance for François’s asking. The guard on duty at the cuddy went off at the double to fetch the Surgeon-Rear-Admiral and François was subjected to a clinical examination of Nonnie’s and Xhabbo’s condition which, thanks to his reading on sleeping sickness was so convincing that the medical Admiral turned to the Admiral and remarked, “He would make a good doctor this young man, sir, but I fear I’ve not got the right drugs with me here. With your permission I suggest we send a signal to base, and that you give the signal and compliance with the signal the highest priority. The young man is right, it’s a matter of life and death.”

  The Admiral immediately ordered his flag-lieutenant to draft the appropriate signal, specifying the drugs needed and in his own hand inscribed the form “Personal from Commander-in-Chief, to Supreme ‘O’, Most Immediate”, which is the highest priority of all in service signalling. The Most Immediate was boldly underlined.

  That done, he turned to François, with a smile on his weather-beaten features, to say, “That ought to satisfy you my lad. I don’t think this degree of priority has been used or requested since the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. But is there anything else we can do?”

  François hesitated, feeling he had already asked too much, but there was such a look in the experienced blue eyes of willingness, even anxiety, to do more, that he ventured to ask tentatively, “I wonder, sir, could you possibly let me have a little more ammunition?”

  “Is that all?” the Admiral sounded surprised as well as disappointed in the smallness of the request, yet stirred to admiration by what it told him of François. “What sort of ammunition?”

  “Please, sir,” François answered more firmly, on his own ground, “twenty-five steel pointed ·22 high velocity and twenty-five lead pointed of the same kind.”

  “Have you got that, S.C.O.?” the Admiral asked the Captain of Operations, who had been following François’s story on a map.

  He looked back steadily at the Admiral, obviously a man of action rather than words. “Have heard, sir. Can do. Will do.” And then, without turning his head, he said over his shoulder to a naval Commander sitting behind him. “You’ve heard, number one? See to it.”

  “Aye, aye sir,” came the reply. Before leaving François had his ammunition.

  Meanwhile Hintza, who as of right had made straight for the head of the table and at one moment had his chin on the admiral’s map as if reassuring himself that his location had been pinpointed correctly there, was being fondled, stroked and admired, and now treated to endless helpings of the hottest, sweetest and milkiest chocolate he had ever drunk. But François, to everyone’s amazement, refused refreshment and food of any kind. He refused, moved though he was by the urgent offers of men stirred by the marks of suffering and deprivation beyond even their varied experience, as much as by the record of endurance and heroism of epic proportions of the four young people.

  François just went on thanking them warmly and said they were much too good and kind, but reiterated that he never drank or ate on the march between sunrise and sunset. He did not disclose that it was a Bushman point of honour, first learned from Koba and then Xhabbo, that the one who went to fetch food and help for stricken companions only ate and drank and benefited by the help obtained when all could eat and drink together again. He was not even tempted
by Hintza’s obvious relish over his chocolate and he gave his mind over entirely to answering more and more thorough questions as to what other things they needed most. Even so, his own feeling of desperation was so successfully conveyed that within an hour of arriving on the ship, the Admiral, Michael Featherstone and the Surgeon-Rear-Admiral in his battle dress, were summoned to the flight deck on the flagship.

  François did not hear, as the door closed behind them, the captain in charge of operations throwing down his pencil on the cuddy table and bursting out, “I don’t know what you all think. But there ought to be a special kind of medal struck for people like that young man. I’ve never heard anything like it. If you fellows followed his story as well as I on this map you must realise what a staggering thing he and his friends have done. I hardly believe it yet myself, dammit. And damn the men who drove them to it.”

  “I’m afraid, Tug, these things are never as simple as our desires.” (Tug was the inevitable nickname of a Captain called Wilson, in a service where all Wilsons automatically became “Tug”.) The naval D.N.I. now spoke directly to him in that kind of reflective, contemplative voice that good D.N.I.s often have. “I’ve been through two world wars now and from what they’ve taught me there’s no medal or order yet designed to reward that kind of person and that sort of thing, even when it is recognised. I fear the reward for them has to be left to what the doing of it gives them.”

  “Oh hell, there you go again,” the Captain exclaimed, “you’d make metaphysics out of old rope. I still say that that boy ought to have some sort of award and the C-in-C ought to see about getting it for him. If he won’t, I shall.” He glared fiercely at them.