A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  François then took out of his pocket the only presents that he and Nonnie had been able to devise for Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara and which was the first thing commissioned and bought for them by Mopani in the capital out of money paid for their story. For suddenly there had been nothing in that great civilisation of theirs that seemed to them of the slightest use to Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara, nothing that would not just clutter up their lives and make them more difficult. Never before had they realised so completely the worthlessness of the European world of things. The presents then were two large, round gold medallions on which the names of Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara were inscribed. Underneath each name, minutely and deeply engraved, was the injunction, “You are commanded by Her Britannic Majesty to aid and protect these two persons wherever you shall find them and to admit and allow no impediment, let or hindrance, into their lives. In case of doubt, sickness or trouble, you are to contact Her Majesty’s nearest representative.”

  Below the injunction was the seal of Her Britannic Majesty and the motto, “I shall maintain”. Both medallions were complete with chains of gold and so were in every detail immune to rust and corruption.

  Nonnie hung the medals round the necks of Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara and embraced them both. But François in the way of the ancient Bushmen he had learned from Koba, just held out his hands to them and they put the tips of the fingers of their outstretched hands, one after the other, to his. They held them so there for a moment, the tips trembling as their pulses met and beat together, and then, quickly, they removed their hands, turned about, and walked out of the camp.

  François and Nonnie stood there and watched them go as they had promised. They kept them in view for close on an hour as they went steadily up towards the dunes in the east, until Nonnie was crying in her heart and praying that they would relent and look back, so that she could have one more glimpse of those beloved faces. But they did not. In tears, she gripped François’s arm and only with difficulty prevented herself from crying out the anguish of the separation opening up wide in her, so fast and so deep.

  Even Hintza, who was sitting bolt upright beside François, could not restrain himself and whimpered. François had to soothe him with a hand. In him the feeling of separation was burning high like a new kind of fire that dispersed any tears as soon as they formed. And so they waited and looked until Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara appeared at last, clear-cut on the dune against the blue in the east out of which the day comes infinitely new and renewable again. They did not, as Nonnie’s heart was imploring them now, stand still even then but went steadily on and over the other side. It was as if she and François were standing on a yellow beach and the sky there so blue that it looked like the blue of the sea which had swallowed up all those brave and jewelled ships of war. Yes, Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara went down into the inexorable blue as if they were going down into the sea itself. At one moment their heads were still there bobbing bravely up and down on the immense blue surface and then suddenly the blue closed over them and all around them the burning desert seemed to go dark and empty.

  That same evening on the dune, Mopani and François sat side by side for the last time there, looking out over the desert and the sea, and talked quietly and long about their future. François, with all that heightening of perception which separation from what one loves most dearly brings, talked as if his whole awareness were made innocent, true and virgin again, so that whatever life henceforth might bring could be written as new upon it again. He told Mopani not only about the debt he owed to Xhabbo but how he knew now that all had started with Ouwa. None of this would have been possible if it had not been for Ouwa, invaded as he was at the time by knowledge of his own impending death, realising how Lammie’s “other little person” needed companionship of his own, and so had gone to Mopani to bring back the little puppy who had become the great and glorious Hintza at his side.

  François and Nonnie would most certainly have been killed like all the rest in the massacre because, if it had not been for Hintza, he would never have known that Xhabbo, caught in a lion trap set by the men of Hunter’s Drift, was even there to be saved. It was strange that in saving Xhabbo he was really saving himself and a Nonnie he did not even know existed. Yes, it was in Ouwa’s concern for what might have been thought of as mere sentimentality in a lonely young boy that all this saving really began.

  Mopani took him up on that and said, yes-no, he was so glad that François could see it like that. It proved what he, Mopani, was feeling more and more on the rounding curve of his own brief life, long as his life might seem to François. Nothing that was ever done was ever wasted or without effect on life. Nothing was ever so insignificant as to be unimportant. Everything in life mattered and ultimately had a place, an impact and a meaning. Centuries could go by before the meaning revealed itself just as years had to go by before the effect, and more, the meaning of Ouwa’s recognition of François’s need, could show itself in the light of François’s day. Perhaps it would be even longer still before the impact of Lammie’s concept of François as that “other little person” would be elucidated.

  François started violently at the mention of Lammie. A strange, familiar feeling of secret guilt, personified almost like a dream figure, stared with an ancient mariner’s eye, and pointed a finger at him from around a corner of his mind. He realised that of the voices which had helped him so loud and clear on the journey behind, that of Lammie, the beautiful, the steady and the clear, had been conspicuously absent. It was not because her going had left him indifferent. His heart was like a ship awash at the thought of the cool, precise, reassuring presence it had lost with her death. But what was this strange resistance within that had silenced a voice like hers with such a clear right of its own to be heard?

  The clue perhaps was in what Mopani was saying. Yes-no, he, who had loved Lammie dearly, had himself been taken aback when he was informed like all others of François’s coming as that of “another little person” to join her and Ouwa. It had often, he must confess, tended to make him critical of Lammie, as if there were a shade too much head and not enough heart in her attitude to François. Now, he was not at all so sure—and here for the first time François saw Mopani in grave difficulties with an emotion that made him hoarse and pause before he continued—yes-no, he was not certain now that it was not one of the bravest things; something of an especially feminine courage, he had ever encountered. For he realised that this concept of Lammie’s was intended to wean François in the most profound manner even before he was born. One could criticise the timing, one could say that the concept was premature, but when one contemplated the havoc caused by mothers and daughters in the lives of sons and lovers by never weaning them in their spirit as they weaned them from the breast, one could only marvel at Lammie for having the courage of such unique, improbable foresight.

  Mopani realised more and more how a major source of corruption in men was their excessive love of the power of ideas—a love so excessive that they did not hesitate to kill and murder one another for them. In women, however, the source tended to be possessive love, a compulsion to command permanently the object of their love, most especially the love of the person from their own bodies. Yet out of her own supreme love of Ouwa, Lammie he was certain, had come to know in full the temptation and dangers of the all-possessive love of her sex and so determined that François should never be a victim of it; that he should never be a mere extension of her and Ouwa’s love, bent to express some unlived aspect of themselves. She seemed to know how that would be the death of him, as if she recognised it already as the explanation of the gap which had opened up so disastrously between parents and their children, between old and young—a young who insisted on being themselves, however unarmed for the task, and not just another pale version of their parents’ pattern. If he were wrong in this, Mopani asked, what other explanation could there be of the ease, the absolute coincidence of the coming of Nonnie into François’s life? Had he ever felt a shimmer of shade even of Lammie come between him and No
nnie or did he not see, as Mopani thought he saw now, how François’s imagination had been opened up and furnished, complete with guest-room ready for the coming of someone like Nonnie. François, he was convinced, owed such readiness in a great measure to Lammie.

  Hearing it like that, François’s heart wept for Lammie as it had not wept before. He found himself stringing the beads of his ’Bamuthi’s beloved metaphor, as stars are strung along the rope of the Milky Way. More, he found himself proving to himself again the truth of old Koba’s admonition in his childhood, “Little Feather, always look for the word, as Mantis did in the beginning, when he gave things their names and their colours, because there is nothing in life too terrible or too sad that will not be your friend when you find the right name to call it by, and calling it by its own name, hastening it will come upright to your side.”

  Yes, Lammie was at last in the blessed company at his side. They were only technically dead. Koba, Ousie-Johanna, ’Bamuthi, Lammie, Ouwa and many more, had almost acquired a living definition and dynamic clarity in death which they had not possessed in life and their voices would be with him always. It was as if suddenly like a flicker of the lightning they had seen below the horizon on the night the voice of the lion had said hail and farewell to them, he had a glimpse of the meaning of immortality to mortal man and how it communicated itself to the living through the intensity of their feelings for the dead, and how a sense of permanence of purpose on earth depended on just that. For a moment he saw through the dark night of the singular lack of grief, the ominous incapacity of contemporary men for experiencing sorrow, that impoverishes the life of our time. And then, with what blessed relief he was free of it, for in remembering the names of praise, as ’Bamuthi used to put it, of all the dead he had loved, he knew he would be remembered by them and spoken to, as Lammie evoked by her name of praise on Mopani’s lips, spoke to him now and begged him to hold his peace and listen on.

  It was always like that with what one did, Mopani was saying. It was always like that with meaning. All had always to begin as something infinitesimally small, something even ridiculous in the light of reason and terms of immediate human need; something only some accepting and listening heart could hear in the kind of stillness of inner isolation such as Ouwa had known and had to answer alone.

  Mopani had been told that there were stars in the sky whose light even now had not yet reached the earth and whose existence one could tell only because of their effect on the movement of other stars. It was precisely so with the life of men on earth. Their deeds were like a kind of starlight that came into being at the moment they were enacted but whose meaning, the light that was in the purpose, the accomplishment and the doing, would take years still to reach life itself, let alone become clear in the human spirit. One could not, therefore, live one’s life with a great enough reverence for what was small, not only in oneself, but in others. The significance of the great could only be real in so far as it was significant in the small, even when so small that at the moment of beginning it was more like the point defined by Euclid as being of no size or magnitude, but only position. Yes-no, it was position in the spirit and the sense of direction that followed logically from the sense of position that was all important, and yet increasingly overlooked because of its lack of discernable substance.

  And it was this sense of direction now that he had to discuss with François. Both of them came from a people who had left Europe centuries before and come to Africa. They came originally not out of any petty or selfish motives because had they conformed to the life of their time in their native context of Europe, they would have been rich and comfortable in the homes they were about to abandon. No, they came not in order to make life more safe and the material rewards of life more abundant but to find a new and better way of being. It was wrong to judge things out of the context of the time which gave them birth. He did not wish to imply that their ancestors had not been right and probably justified in following the truth as they saw it most clearly in their own day. But the truth of yesterday could be the lie of today. They had come to Africa on the assumption that by moving to a new world they would leave their problems behind and find a place where there were no such problems and no such hindrances. They seemed to have had no inkling that human beings, whether they liked it or not, carried their problems about with them wherever they went.

  So in their three hundred and twenty years of a new life, even in the Africa of their promise, when this craving for a better way of being seemed thwarted, they had again and again renounced homes and possessions just as readily as any in Europe and moved deeper into the interior, looking once more for a place where their problems would not exist, where life would be innocent like a slate wiped clean, and they could write all over it perfect phrases and sentences of the perfect life on earth. They had of course found no such thing. They had not only not found it but had gradually begun to create a greater form of tyranny than they had opposed and fled from in the beginning, so unaware were they of the new heresy of believing in places where evil did not exist. Not only were there no such places in Africa but there were none anywhere else in the world. Man had run out of places, had run out of geographical solutions for his problems and changes of scene as a “cure” for his restlessness. The journey in the world without as an answer to our searching and resolution of our failings was dismally bankrupt.

  There was only one thing which could lead to an answer and that was to let the sense of journey expressed for so long in travelling the world without become a journey within the spirit of man. Statesmen, scientists, philosophers, even priests and the whole intellectual trend of the day put up a plausible pretence that our troubles were due to imperfect political systems, badly drawn frontiers and other environmental and economic causes. The whole history of man as he, Mopani, knew it, had tried all those approaches over and over again and at last, as far as he was concerned, they were proved utterly bankrupt. The real, the only crises out of which all evil came was a crisis of meaning. It was the terrible invasion of meaninglessness and a feeling of not belonging invading the awareness of man, that was the unique sickness of our day. And this sickness, he was convinced, was the result of the so-called civilised man, parting company with the natural and instinctive man in himself. Never had the power of the civilised over the natural been so great and never had power corrupted man within himself so dangerously. For that reason the journey within could not be resumed soon enough, the journey of what he called the exiled Jacob back to the Esau, the hunter, whom he had betrayed and with whom he had to be reconciled before he could come home again to inherit his full self.

  This journey to total reconciliation within depended on man standing fast at last in his surroundings and there refusing to give in to any assault on his integrity. He had been horrified by the extent to which people were leaving Africa, saying that they were leaving it for the sake of their children and going back to other amply discredited geographical points of departure and patterns of behaviour as a way out of their problems. Yes-no, we had to stand fast and in standing fast bring out into the world around us what was revealed to ourselves on a new journey within and make it part of our here and now; make what was first and oldest in us, new and immediate. Man had to give all his imagination, all his devotion, before it was too late, to whatever was nearest at hand, refusing nothing, however humble or insignificant or even distasteful that came out of him and at him from his immediate surroundings, but accepting all as the raw and only material, however base, on which he could work, just as those old alchemists of whom he had heard so much from Ouwa, took the basest of all metals—lead—and tried to transform it into gold. By accepting what was nearest at hand and working through it out of love in the most imaginative, precise and intimate co-operation with nature around and within him, man could make himself ready for what would become in time the greatest journey in the world without and that was the journey to the stars.

  He stressed this because it was precisely in this area o
f co-operation with nature without as with the nature within which seemed to him nearest to his and François’s hand. They both had been born into a true partnership with animals, birds, insects, plants, flowers and instinctive men, and knew what wonders it could bring about. That knowledge of theirs somehow had to be made immediate. On this journey which had preceded the massacre at Hunter’s Drift, he had been profoundly depressed by what he had seen abroad. He remembered first going to Europe as a young man to fight in the First World War and from the deck of his troopship, seeing the woods and green fields of England across the Solent stretching towards William the Conqueror’s great New Forest. Oh, that green after Africa had seemed to him a miracle, and he found himself saying to himself, “What a beautiful, truly beautiful country—how it puts my eyes to bed!” It was a world with a sheen upon it as that on a newly born eland calf. But on this last occasion not only in England but all over Europe he had seen signs of a terrible change. The green was not so green. Everywhere grass and trees looked tired and dispirited as if they knew themselves to be there purely for the selfish use of man. They looked as if not all the rain in England could clean them of the smoke, the chemicals, and the indifference to their own especial being with which men were polluting them. He had been even more dismayed by what he had seen in the eyes of the animals; in the dogs, dragged on leads through streets, and the domestic animals by which men lived, like the horse and the cow. The horses looked as if they knew they were doomed and about to be ejected from life for ever, or to use a terrible expression he had encountered on his last visit to England, to be declared “redundant”.

  He found unbearable what he saw in the eyes of cows, bred into an unnatural state by men, so that instead of yielding half a gallon of milk a day that was necessary for rearing their calves, they were bred to develop udders bursting with milk so that they could hardly endure the anguish of it. And all so that they could yield twelve to fourteen gallons a day, not for calves but for men. They were treated not as warm-blooded mammals who had rendered men single service so much as soulless factories. And the milk was often not even drunk but made into synthetic materials, turned into vests, cardigans, underwear and even buttons. They were not even allowed the natural solace of keeping their calves to suckle, because the calves were removed at birth and fed by the hand of some indifferent herdsmen who had just come from fitting a milking machine to the bursting udders of the mother.