The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

by Wilma Stockenstrom

  At night I hear lions roar. Every now and again I get up to throw wood on the fire. Sometimes I see eyes shining greenishly in the firelight. In the mornings I bake tubers that the little people have brought me in the ashes, break open a hard-shelled monkey orange with a stick and scoop the flesh with the stick into my mouth. A gulp of water, baked bulbs, and I am ready to resume my struggle against time. We fight in an endless roundabout circle. I do not manage to divide him up and segment him, so as to form a pattern and control him, in spite of my ingenuity with the beads. I sometimes get confused and forget when I linked what to what. Green and black mixed up in accordance with my mood. I cannot shake time off me. He squats continually before my tree. Everything that has been in my life is always with me, simultaneously, and the events refuse to stand nicely one after the other in a row. They hook into each other, shift around, scatter, force themselves on me or try to slop out of my memory. I have difficulty with them in the necklace of my memory. I am not a carefree little herder of time at all. Day and night pass. Summer and winter, another summer, and here is winter again. This is easy, but not the time that had made of me what I am and that lives within me with another rhythm.

  Sometimes when I am washing myself in the river I regard my reflection critically in a calm pool and try to determine how much older I have become. It is not easy, for however motionless both I and the water are, there is a continual fine wrinkling distortion of my image, a water wrinkle that flatteringly replaces the possible wrinkling of age. I throw a pebble into myself. I rock grotesquely up and down and breakup in lumps. Restless I. Then I withdraw myself from my divided self in the water. How my spirit struggles. I bake myself dry in the sun, dress, and take the path up to my dwelling. Soon the elephants will arrive. The sun already hangs in the baobab’s arms.

  At times simply melancholy.

  I do not follow the little people’s click language. It sounds to me just as if geckos have begun talking. Anyhow, how could I learn it? After that strange first near-meeting they seldom speak within hearing distance of me. One day I saw them bring down a giraffe. While they were flaying the animal and cutting it open they babbled excitedly, even quarreled, so it seemed to me. I listened attentively but learned nothing. It is a language for geckos and tapping beetles.

  Out of respect I stand in such a position in the opening of the baobab that they do not see me. After the time when I forced them to look at me and saw how it offended them, I never force myself on them any more, and accept with gratitude and joy every crumb of food they bring and every object of use.

  And every useless object. Like the handful of little gold nails. How they shine. How pretty. I already have beads, sherds, an ostrich eggshell, clothes, and, wonder of wonders, a whole clay pot black with age but still perfectly usable that the little people found and brought to me and with which I transport water on my head. And now these lovely playthings.

  I let my thoughts roam and imagine the most wonderful history of a town with bulging walls and stones packed in chevrons, of a holy echo that delivers oracles in a roar over the veld. A town more or less like the one we saw the women on our travels building. In fact we passed several such stone towns. Some abandoned and disintegrating, some half-finished and left just like that to become rubble, some in the process of being built. Walls to prop terraces and walls for houses or temples or barns, all erected by the labor of women. There was not a man to be seen anywhere, which as a matter of fact seemed strange to me.

  But perhaps the men were out hunting. Are they out hunting? I asked the stranger over my shoulder.

  I think so, he answered.

  Do the women always build alone? Do they always carry the stones themselves, do they always pack them themselves, do they draw up the plans themselves?

  Strange, strange, answered the stranger.

  From the sedan chairs that carried us swinging from side to side past them, we regarded these zealous women workers curiously. I held a big leaf over my eyes to keep the sun off. Like a real lady I sat and watched the multitude laboring in the scorching sun, and made remarks and observations in a light, contented mood, I felt so good. Never before had life been so pleasant.

  Perhaps the men are out at war. Perhaps they are planning an attack on us, joked the stranger.

  What does our leader say? I asked.

  Oh, he’s always in a bad temper. He is too intense.

  Yes.

  I felt myself to be a peculiarly elevated, untouchable, temporary spectator always on the move, and thought out something else pithy to utter from my seat. Perhaps they are … I wanted to say slave women. I choked the word down.

  Perhaps among them were some of my unknown family members who had remained behind. Perhaps I came from here, or from near by. It was wiser not to ask questions and to let things pass. Or were the men perhaps out on a slave raid, and must the women do the men’s work? The women were bare from the waist up. They wore snail shells and multicolored amulets decorated with beads around their necks and ankle rings of copper wire. So I rode on in perfect privilege, in the security of being preferred, in the status lent to me on this trip by virtue of being the select maidservant of one of the leaders. No, not the maidservant, not at all – the mistress. I had the freedom of finding myself in strange parts with a man on whom I could have doted and a crowd of servants and a surly leader, but him I easily forgot. And no chance of escaping. To throw myself on the mercy of the inhospitable? How foolish that would be. Foolish even to want to make contact with these women when no sure welcome was guaranteed to me and help would not necessarily be offered. So I swung on haughtily but eager-eyed past the brown stone walls in the green grass. No right angles here but soft curves connecting with the earth’s curves. Thus women build.

  For a while I had been noticing something in my front bearer’s hair. Now I saw he was keeping cross money coins there. Stolen money, therefore. Tonight I would warn him to hide it better, for the bearers were continually changed to spread the burdens better. Before long he would have to help carry the eldest son and it was to be doubted whether the latter would let such a glaring offense pass unpunished. Poor devil. Did he want to run away one day? Did he want to flee one night, and in his flight call at villages to buy food? Did he want to take to his heels, his head heavy with metal, his heart light with rejoicing, his insides hollow with fear?

  In fact, he was our first loss. Apparently he managed to disappear. Our second loss was a much more telling blow. The beautiful gentle sanga cattle disappeared overnight as if an earth spirit had made a cavern open and one by one they had all walked in, and now stood lowing in the belly of the earth and clashing their long horns and tramping miserably around.

  We found that we had posted no sentries for the night, since we had never done so. We also found that we had no tracker in service, and we ourselves spotted nothing in the rain-polished veld, just our own muddy prints, traces of frivolousness, proofs of ignorance tramped far and wide.

  It was a serious loss. Not only had the cattle carried the heaviest packs, but they were a last resort if hunger were to stare us in the face, and in addition it had been our intention to exchange them with tribes of the interior, in case of need, for food or information or, if need be, protection. That was how it had been planned.

  The first quarrel between the leaders of the expedition resulted in uneasy silence. A momentary display of indignation, a knife-grinding of reproaches, and both withdrew from the conflict impatient and dissatisfied and stalked around as if a glittering crane crest of aggrievedness were tightly settled on their heads, and their stiff faces betrayed no desire to be reconciled. Stubborn, arrogant, could not sit still so long. A sailor is always on his feet, always on the go. The sea, his road, never rests. It pushes you, pulls you, whisks you up and down, throws you to port, to starboard, it splashes against you, sweeps past you, it takes its form in accord with its whims, it comes rolling mountain high, it becomes a whirlpool and spins you in a deep blue vortex, it stretches itself out fla
t and holds you imprisoned on its calm green mood, it changes and remains the same in its changing and makes of change a permanence and of unpredictability the only predictability. It is not fickle, it is always thus. And therefore he preferred to walk, the stranger explained, mocking himself. In brief, he had neither rest nor peace. In brief, he walked to make the slaves’ work easier.

  I too, some days, usually in the early mornings. My garment drew a wet trail in the dew. There was faint daybreak to give light. I tried to catch up with my long long shadow with greater and greater steps. To be able to walk on my head. I never catch up with myself, I sighed happily. Birds whirred up from the grass. I noted: a steenbuck skipping away – whizz, gone; a troop of redbuck ruminating expressionlessly; a white rhinoceros bull, firm as a rock; a restless red jackal; and a lion with caked mane and flies around its snout yawning the yawn of the satiated and rolling over comically. Till the sun made its nest in my back – then I beckoned the bearers nearer.

  Long ago abandoned trying to hold a conversation with them. My requests were fulfilled in silence. No answers. No questions. It was like trying to get through to zombies. More than in the city where I necessarily had to work with this type, it struck me here in untouched nature how inhumanly they were behaving. Whether unwilling or to appearances obliging, their actions were those of fellows of the tikoloshe-spirit, it occurred to me. Their eyes were peculiarly empty, their motions automatic as if they were obeying built-in commands.

  We have people bewitched among us, I whispered to the stranger.

  Didn’t you notice it before?

  I stared at him in surprise. We were relaxing in the heat of noon under a splendid cucumber tree on the bank of a full river. The eldest son had gone for a walk, as usual without mentioning it to us, without saying where he was going; he would probably reveal nothing when he came back. And we two, we felt too happy in each other’s presence to care about his morbid reserve, we two were a self-sufficiency and, jealously eager for each other’s attention, let the sourpuss go his way.

  We had just finished eating what the slaves had prepared for us. Had it not been for the handfuls of flying ants that one of them had collected the previous night and turned into a tolerable sauce, we would have had to choke down the thick millet porridge just like that. As we had been doing for several days. For with the disappearance (or was it the theft?) of the cattle and the redistribution of the packs, some of the goods had of necessity to be left behind, and thus, by mistake, we had to assume, the rice, the dried shrimps, the mango chutney, the dried fig cakes, the coconuts, the dates and much else was left behind. There were no accusations of carelessness thrown back and forth, but to discord smoldered. One leader formed the vanguard, the other leader and I the rearguard, and we were separated by mistrust and by a train of slaves.

  Sugarbirds clung to the bunches of purple-red flowers that displayed themselves above our heads. There was a languid cooing of doves. A virtual stasis reigned. Water shining among plumed reeds. A caressing breeze. I am listening, I said. Tell.

  At night I call all my familiar spirits, whispered the stranger, pretending to be mysterious. Have you not yet heard the hyena snuffling? Just as well you sleep so deeply. Have you not yet heard the faraway bark of the baboon?

  Have you not yet seen the aardvark’s hump stand out against the moonlight and the long snout with which he sniffs out the corpses? Poor inhabitants of the villages along our route, they don’t know what hits them. They have no knowledge of wizards who make an appearance now here now there and make their familiars violate their graves. Have you not yet seen the eyes shining in the night, eyes red as fire, half-eyes, squint eyes? Have you not yet heard the growling and the scrabbling and the shuffling, and the cracking of bones? I send my familiars into the kraals to the graves of the chieftains. The cattle are too terrified to low. They stand aside. The next day the cows drop calves with two heads and the golden-red acres of millet through which the familiars galloped with their enchanted riders lie flattened and cannot be harvested, and the great famine comes to all the regions through which we travel. The storage baskets are emptied. The livestock die. People look at one another with eyes red as fire, with half-eyes, with squint eyes, and fall upon the weak and eat them up. They cut off their lips and fingertips, they let them bleed to death in pots of water, cook them and eat them up, the tastiest bits for the strongest, the offal and the gravy for what children remain.

  The stranger went and lay flat on his back and stared up through the latticework of branches and dark green insets of foliage to the tatters of blue sky.

  Pretty stories, he said. He supported his head on his hands. I have tried to live, he said, without religion and other such superstitions, without escapism of any kind, and now I find myself in the greatest illusion of my life. Now I seek consolation in shortsightedness and look no further than the night of every day.

  There followed a mumbled rumination that I could not follow properly. I thought I heard him ask me for forgiveness. He stopped the mumbling. He sat up and looked at me narrowly.

  I shall have to live the story out to its end, he decided. All stories end. For a moment he was still, his attention drawn by a swarm of starlings flying round and round the cucumber tree.

  All I know is that I wanted to, he said sharply, as if answering an unuttered question of mine. I wanted to. Then he added, with the slightest trace of a smile in the furrows at the corners of his mouth and in the narrowing of his eyes: I think one can be ridiculous with dignity. Or try to.

  Something broke through the underbrush on our left. Flapping, waving and shouting with fear the eldest son came racing towards us, stumbled like a clown and slipped over the tussocks of grass. The hem of his clothes caught on a num-num bush and held him back; jerking and pulling desperately, beating the bush flat with his cane, he tried angrily to rid himself of the thorns’ grip, but only got further entangled, and eventually had to tear his clothes free. All the while he hoarsely commanded us and the slaves to fall flat, to hide, to crouch, to creep away, to make ourselves scarce.

  Instead of making ourselves scarce we all stood up straight and gazed dumbstruck at the spectacle. With a muffled curse he freed himself from the num-num thorns and stamped over to us and explained that there was an army on the way, on the river.

  Fall flat! Fall flat! he exhorted us panting. He must have run quite a distance in the hot sun.

  He himself fell to his knees behind the dense reeds and hushed as if in prayer. I considered whether to follow his example. The stranger and I exchanged amused looks, though no longer exactly beaming with self-confidence and boldness, and when one of the slaves silently gestured that he saw something coming, we did indeed fall flat with our noses to the ground, each on the spot where he had stood.

  I managed to turn my head carefully to one side and peer at the river, but detected nothing as yet. The plumes arched so calmly. The waterfowl had not let themselves be alarmed. I could see brown ducks drifting in the shallow water and also a giant heron’s motionless head and neck sticking out above the reeds, and as I lifted my face slightly higher I saw the tense blue hovering tremor of a kingfisher at diving distance above the water and could also see the far bank walled off from the veld by a rampart of fully grown wild figs.

  My ears helped me. I heard the thump of oars and concentrated on listening very carefully. I thought I could recognize human voices. Tatters of speech came to us where we lay quiet as wild animals, waiting for danger to pass. Later I saw through jagged cracks in the reeds several hollowed-out tree trunks sailing past in pairs in a kind of formation from left to right, each with a team of rowers rowing upstream with great effort. The oars came up dripping and sank rhythmically. Their progress was very leisurely. Probably the speed of the current was badly against them here. In about the middle of the formation one hollowed-out tree trunk larger than the rest glided past alone, with, it seemed to me, a larger crew wearing tufts of animal tails around their upper arms, and in the stern there seemed
to be a kind of throne on which a man sat with a silvery apeskin cloak around his shoulders, and next to him stood someone holding an object like an umbrella plaited from palm leaves or grass or both over him to protect him from the sun.

  It was not fragments of speech I was hearing, I realized. It was the groaning of the rowers as they labored.

  The giant heron cocked his head. He took one step, another, made sure that his shadow was not falling on the water, and stiffened. The ducks, on the other hand, drifted blandly, quacking, rocking, wagging their tails. The kingfisher had disappeared. Against the pale green background of the wild figs only the tree trunk fleet stood out, edging forward in painfully slow motion.

  I began to get a cramp from lying so still and wished that the warriors, if that was what they were, would hurry up. Also I wanted to sneeze. I doubted that they would hear me so far across the water, but held out for safety’s sake. If they were warriors and if they were hostile to us, then all would be up with us. And before I was caught – this I had vowed to myself – before I was caught I would snatch the stranger’s dagger that he carried in a girdle around his waist and kill myself. Warriors or not, it looked like a show of force of some kind passing us on the way upriver. From where? Where to? It had been a long time since we had seen a village or one of the ruins, or cultivated lands with platforms on which boys sat making a great noise to scare away the swarms of red-beak finches, or herds of sanga cattle with their child herders, or women come to fetch water or to bathe sitting on flat rocks and scouring their soles with stones and joking and laughing boisterously.

  We had long since left the beaten track of the gold and slave routes and followed a course determined by the stories of those seafarers and the desire to be the first to discover a shorter, easier way to their cities and open trade possibilities. The first to discover. To be first. At the forefront of innovation. First to return with an impressive report. What would we sell? Slaves? Ivory? Tortoiseshell? Gold? First find out, before anyone else, before all competitors, what commodities these people needed and what they could offer in exchange, and find out on the spot so that you could speak with authority and be the first to celebrate the victory of big easy profits. That was what it meant to play the discoverer.