Spode took eagerly to the suggestion of filming these trees and I, determined to follow to the end any hint of the creative in him, set everyone to help. For some hours we filmed baobabs both singly and in flushed battalions, from afar and from close-up, finishing with a great-grandfather of a tree by the edge of the Chobe river at a place where both Livingstone and Selous the hunter of Africa are said to have camped.
It was there that I realized suddenly that all was not well between Spode and Stonehouse. Stonehouse had worked hard. He had driven a vehicle for the whole of two difficult days and not shirked a duty in camp. But already I had the impression that he was unduly tired for one so young and strong. I noticed that the night had not really rested him. He was slower than usual in his responses. Spode who had done little except his camera work seemed to take Stonehouse’s fatigue as a personal offence. He became so irritable that in the end I asked Vyan to drive his Land-Rover for him, and took Stonehouse in with me and Comfort for rest. I feared now that it was not just physical exertion but mental conflict that had helped to exhaust Stonehouse.
The second shock came just beyond a small African outpost on the edge of the sleeping sickness country of Northern Bechuanaland. My plan had been, first, to see if there were any remnants left of the fabulous River branch of the Bushman race. That was the main reason why I had begun the journey on the northern frontier of the Kalahari. If there were one place left in Africa with enough water and isolation to have enabled the River Bushman to maintain himself intact, I felt it could only be deep in the land which lay behind the dense sleeping-sickness barrier and waters of this vast swamp made by the rivers flowing down from their source in the highlands of Angola to spread out and vanish in the sand and sun of the Northern Kalahari. While the growing heat of summer was purifying the central desert of foreign invaders I thought I could, without loss of time, explore those enigmatic northern marches. My intention was to begin the task by cutting in between the Chobe river and the great Okovango swamp and to probe all along the edges of the marshes for signs of the River Bushman.
But here, just beyond the discreet huts of reeds and grass where I had proposed swinging away to the north-west we found our route blocked by vast sheets of flood water. I knew that the flood in the swamps had been abnormal. An old friend who had helped me to plan this part of the journey, the valiant Harry Riley of Maun, had been drowned in them some months before. I had expected, however, that the worst of the flood water would have subsided by now. Yet here the floods were decisively blocking our route.
We had no option but to feel our way far round the water to the east, and to climb out of the lapping basin on to the high bush-covered dunes that flanked it. It was hot, tough, and in many ways nerve-racking driving. We had to use our Land-Rovers like tanks and crash our way blindly through bush and undergrowth of tangled, spurred, and spiked thorn trees. The sand beneath us was deep and fine enough for an hour-glass. We had continually to use the four-wheel drive of the Land-Rovers in the lowest gears. Time after time the wind-screen and windows of my own Land-Rover were so deep in leaves and branches, brushing like angry sea-green water over them, that I could not see what lay beyond. The vehicle shook and was submerged like a vessel shipping wave after wave of tumultuous ocean to its funnel-tops. Twisting and turning to avoid only the trunks of adult trees we crashed our way through, like this, for hours. I thought it dramatic enough to justify a picture but Spode when I suggested it said: ‘I’m sorry, I have not the strength . . . later.’
The sun was low when at last we came down the side of the dunes on to a level plain covered with Mapani trees. They are always a brave sight. I know of no tree which partakes so deeply of the nature of Africa, and is so identified with its indomitable spirit of renewal. All the year round they are green, red, and gold, and though the bark of the long slender trunks is twisted with the struggle to break out of tortured earth they mount undismayed, in an upright spiral, into the rain-less blue. There the dying leaf, the new-born bud, and the green, expanding butterfly-wing of the adolescent hang side by side to give great, silent, and forgotten plains the look of early autumn. Now when we camped among them the last of the sunlight was dripping like honey from their leaves and barley-sugar stems. The night, however, was not silent. From sunset to dawn the croaking of frogs to the west warned us that the waters from the overflowing marshes were still near.
As a result the next day we held on south until we came to the first of the blue Shinamba Hills. I have always longed to climb them. No white person, I believe, has yet done so. But regretfully I felt compelled to swerve smartly around them and leave them like a puff of smoke above the flickering flame of the burning, northern waterless plains.
Just beyond the hills, the plain levelled. Three amazed giraffes in Harlequin silk watched us go by, and suddenly far below we saw vast herds of game grazing up to their chins in the grass between the sparkling Mopani forests and the pink and mauve mists drawn up, steaming, from the molten marshes. The animals shone and glittered as if their colours were newly painted, and every now and then a group of youngsters broke from the herd to dance a provocative ballet of sheer fire above the yellow grass.
Vyan and Hatherall climbed on to the roof of their vehicle to watch. Jeremiah, John, Cheruyiot, and Stonehouse excitedly followed their example. Only Spode, tired and depressed, leaned against the door of his vehicle.
‘By Jove, Ben!’ I heard Vyan said. ‘It’s unbelievable! They’re there in thousands! Zebra, wildebeest, roan, sable, giraffe, tssessebe, and hartebeest!’
Some twelve miles further on, just within the outskirts of another colourful Mopani forest, we found two round pans, side by side, and full to the brim with water. It was only eleven in the morning but the look of strain on the faces of Spode and Stonehouse decided me. Perhaps I had been going too fast and too hard for them. Perhaps the fault lay there. I must give them time to get acclimatized.
‘We’ll camp here for a day or two and scout around at leisure to see what this part of the country can produce,’ I told them all.
The relief on their faces seemed to prove the wisdom of the decision, and even Vyan and Hatherall seemed pleased.
We unloaded our vehicles so that we could re-pack with the benefit of the experience gained. We built an ideal camp. Vyan and Hatherall went out to hunt for food and came back in the early afternoon with a purple hartebeest slung over the bonnet of a Land-Rover, saying: ‘There’s enough to feed an army out there.’
Part of the hartebeest we stacked in the fork of a tree nearby as bait for lion or leopard in the hope, after dark, of filming them and recording their table-talk. I myself went out later taking Stonehouse with me. The Mopani forest and clearings were scribbled bright with the colour of zebra, roan, and kudu. I came back in the evening to see Spode preparing flares and microphones for work in the dark around the camp. Already the rest seemed to have done him good and we sat down to a cheerful dinner of pot-roasted steak and liver of hartebeest. We went early to bed with crickets, owls, and frogs singing us to sleep. Only the lion, no doubt too easily fed with so much game about, did not come to try our bait. Instead, at midnight, a fearful hyaena crept into camp to taste it. The sight of the coals of our fire, however, sent him howling with dismay back into the night.
Early the next morning we tried another probe into the country to the west. We made straight for the great depression which lies between the marshes of the Chobe and Okovango. Ben was leading, and had just broken out of the Mopani forest to enter the yellow grass and black-thorn tree veld at the beginning of the long declivity, when he suddenly stopped. Our Land-Rovers were already black with the tsetse fly, bearers of sleeping sickness, pricking whatever was bare flesh with quick rapier thrusts. Ben himself, slapping his arms and neck continuously, was kneeling in the grass and pointing. Almost against the front wheels of his vehicle was the gleam of a line of jade-black water advancing slyly through the tangled turf and thorn. The day was hot and cloudless. For months the days had been
bright and dry, yet, uncannily it seemed, there was water rising inexorably at his feet.
‘September and the flood waters still rising!’ he exclaimed. ‘I bet it’s centuries since it got as far as this. Nor would I have believed that tsetse fly would come out so deeply into the plain.’
We were forced to turn round and soon were back at our camp by the waters among the Mopani trees for another easy day and early night.
The following day we made a further determined attempt to outflank the rising water by a wide turning movement first east, then south and finally towards evening, west. We did long miles driving through deep sand the colour and texture of powdered Parisian rouge. The work of breaking through both it and the bush, simultaneously, was so hard that I constantly changed the leading vehicle. We broke through in the end without delay or mishap, but the hard labour of the engines, the heat and dust of the day, the constant bumping and rocking up and down, added much to the strain of another long lap in the journey. When once more at sundown we found our way blocked by impassive waters, the sense of frustration was more than some of us could bear.
I had gone ahead to pick a site for a camp on ground as high as possible above the water. It was a lovely situation in the open between immense black-thorn trees, with water for cooking and wood for fire near at hand. Only it was over-populated with tsetse fly. The first outcry came when the fly started stinging us immediately we began pitching camp. I pointed out that the fly would go the moment the sun went down and the complaining ceased. At that moment, however, Spode and Stonehouse, who had taken my place at the tail, drove into the clearing. The Land-Rover had hardly stopped when Spode flung himself out of it and came running towards me with a canvas water-bag in his hand.
‘What’s the meaning of this,’ he shouted, shaking the bag. ‘What d’you mean by giving me such filthy water to drink?’
‘What’s the matter with it?’ I asked keeping my voice low, but aware that everyone had stopped to listen though none, except Comfort, understood French. ‘It was boiled last night. I saw to it myself.’
‘It’s foul to taste and I’ll not put up with it any longer!’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to drink worse before we’re through,’ I told him.
‘Stop speaking to me as if I’m a child,’ he cried out more angry than ever. ‘I’ll have you know I’m not a child.’
‘Sometimes, Eugene, I’m not so sure of that,’ I said, saying, I believe, the only sharp thing I ever did on the journey.
Taken aback for one moment he glared at me. For a moment I thought he would hit me. Instead he shook a clenched fist and demanded to be sent back to Europe at once.
‘You’ve contracted to do a film with me,’ I told him firmly. ‘And I’ll release you from your pledge when you’ve done it. We’ve done little enough work so far. I think you’re just tired out. You’ll feel better after tea. Ask Jeremiah for a lemon and squeeze that into your water if you don’t like the taste.’
‘A lemon, bah!’ He made a mouth of disgust at what, for the rest of us, was a luxury and stumped off irately to his vehicle.
After drinks at sundown, however, he drew me on one side and apologized handsomely. The real trouble he explained was that he could not get on with Simon Stonehouse. He was really no use to him and he would rather go on alone, doing all the work himself, than have an unwilling helper. I told Spode I thought they were both tired and not yet acclimatized. I asked him to try out the situation a bit longer. I did not labour the obvious point, that we were nearly a week’s hard travelling from the nearest railway and could not possibly exchange personnel. He seemed content with that and assured me he was more determined than ever to make our film. In the meanwhile, I had heard another version of the situation from Stonehouse, who was making me increasingly anxious. I had never known a more willing person and as I watched his drawn face closely in the firelight that evening, I told myself that if it were purely a question of physical strain he could learn in time to endure it. But I was not so certain that he could support as well the strain of working under someone so different as Spode. His open young face looked to me almost tragic with two kinds of fatigue.
For once the charm of hot food, a night of stars, and the prospect of sleep in the singing bush failed to cheer me. The doubts which had been in my own mind since Bulawayo had been emphasized by Spode’s scene in the afternoon. It seemed to me that everyone round me, Vyan, Hatherall, and Charles, Cheruyiot and Jeremiah, was now busy reinterpreting our situation with new insight. Comfort, who had understood more than most, was particularly uneasy that evening. He kept on getting up from the fire and standing and listening intently on the edge of the firelight.
‘What’s the matter, Comfort?’ I asked at last joining him there.
‘Don’t know, sir,’ he said turning round, the firelight warm in his shrewd disciplined eyes. ‘Don’t know. There’s plenty of lion about, I think, and strange people out there and . . . But I don’t really know, sir.’
It was certainly odd that we had gone hundreds of miles without hearing a lion. As Vyan remarked later: ‘The silent ones are the dangerous ones. I certainly like mine to roar at night.’ But there was more to it than that, as Comfort knew.
Before it was fully light Comfort left camp with a gun in the crook of his arm. He was back at sunrise leading an old man armed with one of the carbines that had caused the Indian Mutiny, and accompanied by a little boy. The old man trembled with fever, his cheeks were hollow, his eyes dull with the drowsiness that precedes the final sleep of the sickness carried by the fly. Yet he was hungry and we fed both well.
While feeding, the old man told us that neither lion nor water had ever been so plentiful. Everywhere the water between the Chobe and Okovango stood in one continuous and expanding sheet. There was, he assured us, no hope of getting through to the west, and no Bushman on our side of the swamps. In fact he had not seen one for many years. His own hut was the only one in a distance of four days’ walking, and he lived there alone with his ancient gun to feed his women and children.
It was by then eight o’clock on Sunday morning and immediately after filming, which Spode did willingly and well, I called them all together and said: ‘I’m afraid it’s no use going on trying to get through the floods on this side. We’ll call it off and see if we can’t take the water in the rear. We’ll make for Harry Riley’s old track to Maun, and go the six hundred miles round the marshes to Old Muhembo on the Okovango, at the sluice way to the swamps. We’ll leave our Land-Rovers there, get a boat or dug-outs if necessary, and break into the swamp that way. If the water is still high enough we might even go through the centre on the current for the whole of the four hundred miles to Maun. If there are any River Bushman left that’s where we’ll find them.’
After breakfast we picked up the rut Harry Riley, many years before, had opened up between the Zambesi and Maun. Our Land-Rovers sped along it, once more making that musical sound I love so well when they travel fast. The only real discomfort was caused by the tsetse fly. They settled on our vehicles in such dense masses that the metal bonnets looked as if covered with calico and I could hardly see through the windscreen. We had to keep our windows firmly shut and that of course made it very hot. I stopped only once to try and get Spode to film the tsetse fly.
He asked: ‘Will there be another occasion later on?’
‘There may be,’ I said. ‘Though I doubt if so impressive a one.’
‘Later!’ he muttered firmly, quickly shutting the window of his car against the hungry fly.
Soon we struck the first of the Batawana settlements that crowd the edges of the stream and swamps round the small administrative settlement of Maun. Just before we reached the rough home-made causeway of Mopani timbers and stone thrown across the water to the village, a tall European came running out from behind a neat Batawana hut to stand beside a pile of kit and a pair of guns on the edge of the track. When he saw us it was clear we were not what he was expecting for listlessly he wa
ved us on. But there was time enough on that Sunday, between the swamp and the desert, for us to catch the glimpse of night in his eyes.
‘Good God, Laurens!’ Vyan exclaimed involuntarily as we drove by. ‘What was the matter with that fellow? Did you see the look on his face?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, thinking it was exactly the look I had seen on the condemned Bushman’s face at the other end of the journey. Suddenly the darkness seemed to link all together. ‘Shall we stop?’
‘No!’ Vyan said, looking out. ‘It’s no good. He’s waving the others on as well.’
I thought no more of it for the moment because we were approaching Maun, and I was wishing, for the sake of the others, that they could have seen the place as I first saw it years before, after days of weary travelling across the long miles of empty waterless country between it and the Great North Road. Then the wide river of water, the lily-covered creeks, banks of green grass, and spreading acacia, flamboyant, and other trees, took on in ones’ travel-stained senses the wonder of a dream oasis fulfilled. I remembered the welcome Harry Riley had given me in his remarkable little hotel which he had founded for the odd, intrepid traveller who had been determined enough to cross the desert, as well as for the score or so of Europeans patient and courageous enough to make Maun the unique outpost of life that it is today. The settlement lay there in the overwhelming sun of noon-day, a fortress of green with a moat of blue Okovango water around it keeping out the great grey Kalahari wasteland.
The Lost World of the Kalahari Page 12
