The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  ‘Ag! Man!’ he exclaimed with a pronounced South African accent. ‘That’s nothing! You should see from above! The bush from here for seventy miles west is alive with them, zebra, buffalo, giraffe, wildebeest, and heaven knows what not! All falling back on the river now the summer’s coming.’

  I sped back happy with the news to the others. But before I could speak I was told by Charles with a gloomy face: ‘Bad news, Colonel. Some of these tanks we had to fit in such a hurry in Johannesburg are leaking at the seams!’

  The next day was a Sunday and like so many Sundays on this journey a day elect for climax and crisis. The garage in Livingstone was shut but again a friend came to the rescue. We broke in on his fishing and all day long Charles, I, and two mechanics dismantled the tanks and worked on them. By nightfall they were ready, tested, and passed fit for desert travel. The tanks were refitted the next day, the vehicle refuelled and reloaded, and by two o’clock on the afternoon of 3 September, only two days after a zero hour fixed months before, we began the main journey. Someone suggested, vaguely, that we could spend another night in the comfort of the hotel, but Ben silenced it with a quiet: ‘Look! There is only one time to start on this sort of a journey; not when you feel like it but when you’re ready for it.’

  With Ben leading we drove west along a deep sandy track in the black bush parallel with the river. We camped early, for the first camp is always the most difficult and I wanted to allow enough daylight for the inevitable confusion and complications that would arise. Ben, Vyan, and Cheruyiot (the Knipsigis servant and tracker Vyan had brought with him from East Africa) needed no prompting. Some of the others, however, wanted their tea before pitching camp. I stuck firmly to a rule I had learnt from my own pioneering kinsmen: organize camp first against the night before pausing for rest and refreshment, otherwise it is never done so well or so quickly.

  There is nothing like one’s first, or one’s last, camp. Others may be more beautiful, hold more delight, and produce greater drama, but those at the beginning and end have a unique quality all their own given them not by the people who build them, so much as by some abiding symbolism of life. They are Alpha and Omega and they give, rather than take, from one. I do not know what the others were feeling on that still transparent evening, deep in the red Kalahari sand in the black-bush which crowds the catchments of the rivers of Northern Bechuanaland. I know only that it would be impossible to exaggerate my content in being there at last. For the moment I forgot even my disquiet about Spode and watched, not without a quick glow of satisfaction, the detail of the plan, so long and affectionately held in mind, come alive in its native setting. I had chosen African blankets of vivid colour and different tribal design for each one of us, and I was heartened to see the colour and pattern of Africa in the nine separate coverings lighting up the long evening shadows among the trees.

  From the vehicle I was unloading I watched Cheruyiot, tall, lithe, and fine-boned as are so many East Africans, moving with the long elastic step of a born plainsman between the Land-Rovers and the kitchen that John and Jeremiah were making near by. Although he did not speak a word of their language the three of them appeared old friends. As he put down a can of water Jeremiah looked up with a smile and said precisely, in English: ‘Thank you, Jambo,’ the nickname they had given him after the Swahili greeting he had used on their first meeting. I watched him and John go off into the bush and come back dragging branches of dead wood until a pile high enough for a pagan king’s pyre was stacked handy for Jeremiah.

  ‘Thank you, John! Thank you, Jambo!’ Jeremiah said again, the laugh that went with it quickly giving way to that dedicated look which comes upon a man’s face when he makes a fire in a natural place. For one brief instant between the striking of the match and the quick leap of the first flame upwards on a pigs-tail of startled smoke, Jeremiah’s bowed head might have been that of the first man lighting his first fire. Miraculously, just at that moment a little bird appeared on the branch of a tree behind him, flapping its wings and delivering with a silver clarity the urgent message my Bushman nurses had decoded for me as a child: ‘Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick!’

  At once Jeremiah stood up from his fire in amazement, and then a laugh straight from the pit of his stomach and round with content, broke from him.

  ‘Look, Master!’ he called, the marvel deep in his voice. ‘Look, John! Look, Jambo! The honey-diviner.’

  He took a step forward as if prepared to drop everything and follow the bird to the store of wild honey it was so ardently advertising. The little bird saw his step and fluttered hopefully on to a tree deeper in the bush.

  I smiled at Jeremiah, shook my head and said: ‘It’s too late!’

  Soon the unfollowed bird was back again on its perch by the fire and stayed there beseeching Jeremiah with the hysteria of despair, until the sun red and tired sank into the leaves of the dense trees.

  ‘That, John, that, Jambo,’ I heard Jeremiah lecturing them in his pedantic way as he busied himself about his pots, ‘is the honey-diviner of my country, which, I’ll have you know, lies just on the other side of that river which goes like a great wind through these trees. . . . Follow the bird and it will lead you to sweet brown honey but always be careful to share the honey with it. . . . If you do not, it will punish you heavily. . . . I once knew a man whose stomach was too big for his eyes – no, not a man of my own people but of the stupid Bapedi – he cheated the bird out of its share and the very next day it called on him again and led him straight to a hole where there was no honey but an angry female puff-adder who bit him on his greedy hand and killed him. . . . Another bird who had been cheated once led a man into the mouth of a lion. . . . I tell you that bird is too clever for a man to cheat.’

  Clever was Jeremiah’s favourite adjective of praise.

  ‘Auck!’ exclaimed John who had understood it all and laughed out of politeness as well as wonder. But Cheruyiot who caught only the gist of the meaning from the onomatopoeic words and expressive gestures just showed his white teeth and pointed with his finger appreciatively at the bird.

  ‘Look, Jambo!’ Jeremiah told him demonstrating his meaning on his own thumb. ‘If you must point in that direction, please be so good as to refrain from doing it so rudely with your finger straight out like that, but instead, politely, only with the knuckle of your thumb, the tip turned down towards your hand thus. . . . Otherwise you’ll send away the rain we’ll be needing soon.’

  Meanwhile Vyan had taken out his gun and mine to give them the attention a good rifle needs each night in Africa.

  Hatherall set a bottle of brandy and some tumblers on the table that he and Charles had just put up. This was an old established ritual of ours conscientiously observed each day as the sun went down. While the others drank brandy and water I had a large jug of coffee. ‘Look, Ben,’ I said, ‘Wyndham’s brought it with him again!’

  Vyan, pipe in mouth, was looking up the barrel of his favourite gun, his 6.5 Schönhauer Mannlicher. The stock was worn bare with long use like a constantly washed kitchen draining board. It was Vyan’s first gun in Africa and it would probably be his last. It was, I suspect, more than a gun to him, but rather a proved instrument of his accurate and unwavering spirit. I would not have been surprised if he had given it a name as Arthur’s knights named their swords in order to express their symbolic character. But I had listened to many arguments in the past between Vyan and Ben about that gun. To the hunter a gun is what a pen is to a writer. One must have one’s own pen for writing: and one’s own gun for shooting. Ben was convinced that Vyan’s gun was too light for the big game of Africa. Vyan was determined that other guns were too heavy, less precise, and not quick enough.

  ‘But he’ll never have another gun,’ Ben had said to me frowning. ‘You know, Colonel, it’s the one thing I can’t understand about Wyndham. He knows Africa so well, and yet is content with so puny a gun. If he weren’t such a good shot he’d have been dead long since. But he’ll never change. Strange that he should
be so obstinate about it.’

  Looking at Ben’s own gun, a nine-millimetre Mauser of as ancient a make as Vyan’s, tenderly laid out for its evening cleaning on a fiery pile of blankets, I laughed to myself.

  When all the work was done and the party complete around the table, I was delighted to find Spode well under the influence of his first camp. He was once more the person I had seen in London, both charming and thoughtful. He joined in the conversation so freely that I was unable to take part in it but had to concentrate on interpreting between him and the others! After the first drink he went to his Land-Rover and came back with a box of expensive cigars which he pressed on us all. After the second he went and fetched his violin.

  Walking away from us to the jagged edge of the light thrown by our fires on the darkness he stood with his back to the camp and began to play as if somewhere in the bush there was a great and expert audience. Everyone stopped talking. Even John, Jeremiah, and Cheruyiot went silent by the kitchen fire. For about half an hour Spode stood there playing with increasing concentration and power. It seemed to us, watching his short, square figure, head bowed over his violin and the bow itself flashing in the firelight, that there was far more than fiddling to it. I myself had a feeling that he was trying to exorcise some obstructive spirit, or defying some judgement of fate. I found myself strangely moved by the sight. Then he suddenly stopped, swung round abruptly and came stumbling back out of his border zone towards the light.

  I jumped up feeling it was urgent to go and thank him.

  He was in tears. He put his arms round my shoulders and said: ‘Laurens, for a moment I forgot myself and just thought of the music to play to the forest! It was wonderful! I completely forgot myself, and I do not know when I have last done that. . . . Oh! Why does life do such terrible things to one?’

  All that evening I reproached myself for having been too critical of Spode. I told myself: ‘What you have seen tonight is central. You must never forget it and keep it at the core of your attitude.’

  Even Vyan and Ben, though they knew nothing of my difficulty with Spode for I had not spoken a word of misgiving to them, were aware of the change in Spode. They responded so warmly that when we went to bed soon after, I felt once more we had a chance of all being united on the journey.

  I did my last round of the camp with a lighter heart. The bush was more silent than I had ever known it. Not a bird called, no jackal barked, no leopard coughed, no lion roared. Only faintly to the north the air of night like a wind of summer brought up the sound of the great river hastening out of the west towards the sun in the far Indian sea. I crept into my blankets and lay on my back watching the stars swinging above me like the masthead lights of a great concourse of shipping, and feeling the earth, black sails filled with the trade-wind of time, hastening over the swell of the dark to keep in station with them.

  ‘This’, I thought before sleeping, ‘is Alpha Plus.’

  As always in the bush I woke many times, listening only long enough to decipher the signs of the night. But even the river had gone inaudible and the stillness was unbroken, if one can speak of stillness on a clear night under the stars in Africa. Night silence in Africa always holds the far sea-sound of urgent stars. This first night was no exception. When I woke for the last time it was as if to the surf of a starry breaker hissing in my ear. My favourite constellation, the belted hunter Orion, was about to enter a forest beyond the foreshore of a new world. My watch showed the day about to break. I rolled out of my blankets. I like to be up first in my own camp, to wake the cook myself, to shave while he boils the kettle, and then to call the rest of the company with a warm cup of coffee. Jeremiah, I was pleased to see, rose easily from his bed. Before the sun rose breakfast was on the fire and the camp on foot.

  The moment it was light enough Vyan, Ben, and I went to examine the record of the night scribbled on the sand around the camp. This, too, had been a rule of my life ever since I first went into the bush and the three of us never fail to find the early morning reading of the hieroglyphic spoor in the earth of Africa full of meaning. We learnt, this day, that our arrival had not passed unnoticed. We had been royally observed. Not fifty yards from our fire a great lion had made a circuit of our camp. Ben thought the spoor only an hour old because the sand along the ridge of the broad pug-marks was not yet settled and still rolled inwards when touched lightly with a stem of grass. There was much other spoor as well, but all old. Only this imprint of an imperial paw was new and deep in the blood-red earth like a seal on the warrant for our journey.

  By eight o’clock we were once more on the move. On this occasion Spode travelled with me at the head of the line so that we should be the first to see the game and, if possible, film it. But I was dismayed to find the old look of conflict back on his face. It was not improved by the heat. Although we were only in the first days of spring in sub-tropical Africa, by European standards it was already hot before ten. Yet the journey was of unending interest and I tried to get Spode to feel it too.

  We had not gone far when a volume of sub-human screaming and sobbing broke out in the long grass of the clearing between us and the bush along the river. A troop of about two hundred baboons came fleeing across our tracks in the hysteria of overwhelming fear. Some baboon mothers had tiny babies with rose-pink faces and eyes wide with terror sobbing on their backs, their long little fingers and prehensile toes clutching at the auburn hair on lean maternal flanks. Others had babies slung underneath their stomachs. All with long loping bounds fled across the clearing towards the tall trees beyond and the promise of safety in their branches. The sight of us merely opened up another prospect of terror already too great to bear, and some old male baboons who were trying manfully to keep silent as they feverishly brought up the rear immediately added their booming bark to the high-pitched shrieks and cries of their women and children. So fast did they travel that in a moment they were out of sight and the bush as still as ever. Were it not for some vultures in the blue air spinning over the place from which the baboons had fled there would have been no sign to remind us of the desperate retreat from tragedy. Close to the wheels of my Land-Rover I found the fresh spoor of a lion warm in the still crumbling sand.

  We had stopped to give Spode a chance to film the incident, but it was over so quickly that he could not do much about it. It was certainly no fault of his. Yet the lack of success weighed out of all proportion on him and seemed to fit only too well into some gloomy preconception of his about the journey. It also seemed to make him want to get away from me. He asked to be allowed to join Simon Stonehouse in his Land-Rover.

  I fell back into my old place at the rear and put Ben in front with Spode’s Land-Rover immediately behind, and instructed Ben to do all he could to help with any filming Spode might want to do. We pressed on hard in this formation all morning. By noon we were close to the junction of the Chobe and Zambezi river and could begin to swing away to the south-west. We stopped briefly at the frontier post of Kasane. An efficient young officer welcomed us and insisted only that we should take on with us one of his African policemen who already had done several patrols deep into the country ahead. I was about to refuse because taking another new personality into our small group before it had found its own coherence seemed to me a complication, when I saw the man he proposed should accompany us. He stood there as if about to go on ceremonial parade looking at me out of shrewd, steady Bantu eyes. He, too, was an old soldier who had served abroad in the war, spoke good English, and to my amazement had a smattering of French. When I asked him his name, he came to attention and said crisply: ‘Trooper Khgometsu.’ Khgometsu is the Sechuana for ‘comfort’, and a comfort he proved indeed.

  I had him next to me in my Land-Rover for the rest of the day. We moved up again to the head of the line as I had been warned that the next fifty miles were extremely dangerous because great herds of elephant were wandering between the waterless bush and river. As always the responsibility of young calves had set on edge the nerves of co
ws and bulls. Comfort told me of several recent exceedingly uncomfortable meetings with herds. One old bull, already so notorious that he had been christened ‘Old Sway Back’ because of the violent manner in which he came out on any scent that perturbed him, some days before had forced the police jeep to retreat precipitately in reverse for close on a mile. The track for nearly fifty miles was a continuous series of elephant spoor deep in the sand. Elephant dung everywhere lay still warm and steaming in the grass. The going was made rough and difficult for the leading vehicle by elephant potholes. But just before sundown when we climbed out of the sandy depression in the river basin to camp on a rise overlooking the Chobe the heavy spoor diminished suddenly and fell away abruptly behind us. We thought we were clear of that particular hazard, but we thought too soon.

  At two o’clock in the morning in my deepest sleep an alarming noise reached me. It was already over when I woke but it lingered in my memory like the echo of a gunshot. I listened and looked. The fire had died down to a great coal pinned like a crimson rose to the dark earth. Everyone was fast asleep. Had I been mistaken? No! There was something moving with a heavy, sagging stealth just beyond the fire. I threw my mosquito net aside and leapt to the fire calling on Jeremiah to wake up as I threw fresh wood on it. Jeremiah huffed and puffed air into the coals like Aeolus blowing up a gale, and the fire flared up quickly. The bush immediately began to heave and crackle and the regiment of elephant which encircled us quickly retreated into the night. At sunrise we found one elephant spoor satin in the sand only ten yards from the fire and close-by was the broken branch of dead wood on which he had trodden and woken me from my sleep.

  The day, however, brought shocks of a different and more lasting kind. We were entering great baobab-tree country. These fantastic trees had already stirred Spode’s imagination in a manner which looked as if it might really become productive. One of my favourite Bushman stories declared that these trees were planted upside down by a mischievous member of ‘the persons of the early race’. Livingstone, who could be as prosaic in words as he was imaginative in deed, said they looked like carrots put in the earth the wrong end up. They are unlike any other tree, looking more like a product of fever and sunstroke than a normal botanical concept. Even the bark of the baobab is flushed and hot. Its varicose veins, full of permanganate sap, show up on the surface swollen and clotted with the malaise of its birth. For all its immense girth and appearance of strength, it is hollow inside. On this hot morning stripped of leaves and tartar fruit they stood out beside our route with their swollen apoplectic columns like the arms of a brood of Titans buried alive, wide open hands protruding from the grave and vainly appealing to the stark blue sky now filled with vultures. The botanist, too, has caught the image of these contorted fingers and called the species Andisonia Digitata.