The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  ‘You know, Wyndham,’ I told him, ‘the first night I ever spent in Maun, Harry and his friends gave a dance. We danced barefoot on the deep grass to the music of concertina, banjo, and guitar, our feet wet with dew and the lions roaring back at us down-river.’

  ‘I can’t imagine the place without Harry,’ Vyan said quietly, for he too had known him.

  We made directly for the little hotel, where Harry’s nephew and widow prepared lunch for us. While the others waited to eat I went to confirm that the petrol and stores, ordered many months before, were there. Then I called on the D.C. and his wife, both old friends. He was about to go fishing with his family but they delayed their departure to organize baths for us, and allot us a camping site under a tree at the bottom of his garden by the river. I visited the representative of the mines I have mentioned, also a friend. He was listening to a gramophone record of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker’ music when I arrived. We sat on the veranda of his house in the cool, discussing my plan at length.

  ‘Of course we can help,’ he said simply, and got up instantly to send a colleague in Muhembo a request by radio telephone (the only means of immediate communication between Maun and it) to organize a boat, or dug-outs and paddlers, for a journey into the swamp.

  I got back to the hotel just as the others were finishing a lunch of yellow Okovango bream, duck, and lager beer. At that moment, also, the door on the mosquito-proof veranda opened and slammed sharply. The tall European we had seen on the road walked in, sat down silently in a wicker chair, giving us again just one dark unseeing look. For the moment I had the impulse to ask him to join us in a drink, but I was in a hurry and felt already somewhat overburdened. The impulse passed. Without bothering about food I took the others to pitch camp. While we were doing so, Simon Stonehouse suddenly began swaying on his feet. I ran to him and led him away, making him lie down in the shade of the tree. One moment he was white, then deeply flushed in the face. His pulse was racing. As soon as the camp was made, I took him to the hotel and asked for a spare bed for him. In the evening when all was finally organized I went and sat by him and we had a long talk.

  I explained that what we had been through was child’s play compared to what was to come. For some days already I had been afraid that without a long period of conditioning the kind of journey we were making would be too much for him. The temperature and collapse that afternoon showed how justified those fears had been. I wanted him to know, therefore, that I was not going to take him on with us, but was arranging for him to be flown out to the railway at Francistown by one of the aeroplanes of the mines as soon as he was better.

  I did not tell him Spode had already suggested his going, nor did I say I could imagine nothing more unfair to an impressionable boy than being made to endure in conditions of severe physical strain, a conflict of loyalties between Spode, who had invited him, and the leader of the expedition, who engaged him. I told him also, because I thought uncertainty was bad for him, that the decision was final.

  I then went and told Spode what I had done, saying I proposed asking the head of police if Comfort, who was supposed to turn back at Maun, could continue with us. I suggested that as he spoke French he should be attached to Spode as his full-time assistant. Spode appeared delighted with the arrangement. In camp that night he was once again his charming continental self.

  I was hardly asleep when the noise of someone running towards the camp woke me. It was Stonehouse in pyjamas and boots. He seized me by the shoulders saying wildly: ‘What am I doing in the hotel? Why am I not here? How did I get there?’

  ‘I took you there this afternoon. Don’t you remember?’ I answered.

  ‘No, I don’t . . . What’s happening to me?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in the morning.’

  With great difficulty I persuaded him to go back to bed. I was about to sleep again when the sound of a truck, approaching at high speed, startled me. Its lights flashed wildly above the bush and water. Brakes screaming, it stopped abruptly at the D.C.’s house. In a few minutes it was off again and vanished, travelling fast. Somehow it brought an element of hysterical alarm into the atmosphere of the night and became quickly associated in my mind with the more negative forces which seemed to beset us. I had done all I could to beat off shadows, yet a sense of subtle disintegration, working against the purposeful composition of our party, persisted. I have had many difficulties on other expeditions in Africa and the East. I had expected difficulty and disappointment on this journey too, but nothing so elusive as this. I lay there for long, watching our fire die down, and the darkness beyond seemed to me as charged with negation as one of those firelight pictures of Goya crowded with nightmare shapes.

  In the morning when I met the D.C. on my way to his bathroom he seemed abnormally tired. ‘Sorry,’ he yawned. ‘Had a bad night. Fellow committed suicide.’

  Instantly I remembered the truck in the night. And as instantly I knew who was the victim. To an amazed D.C. I described the tall European we had passed on the way.

  ‘That’s the man,’ he nodded. ‘Poor fellow, he had put a black woman in the family way. We thought it was best to send a police truck for him yesterday to get him to go back to his own people. But he didn’t want to go.’

  When I told the others about it at breakfast Vyan became immensely angry: ‘There’s a pretty comment’, he said, ‘on your European civilization. A man has to commit suicide because he’s done the most natural thing in the world. And what could be more natural than that a young man in his loneliness – and, my God, how lonely it can be for them in places like this! – should go with one of these black women? But the end has to be suicide. I believe “suicide” is written in capital letters over all your European culture, in Africa and everywhere else.’

  ‘What worries me’, I told him, ‘is my end of it. I’ve a feeling we might have prevented it.’

  I told him of my impulse to ask the man to join us in a drink, and my belief that such a gesture, slight as it was, might have turned the tide in him, breaking the sense of isolation imposed upon him by his official excommunication from European society and his own civilized conscience.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Vyan answered. ‘But, dammit, Laurens, one’d go mad if one carried one’s sense of responsibility to such lengths!’

  ‘When one’s aware of these things perhaps one’s mad not to,’ I replied. And to this day the question persists. All I suspect is that the fear that drove the Bushman to ritual murder, and this poor lonely boy caught between the swamp and the desert to suicide, together with the forces of law and order that condemn them both, are all part of the rejection and subsequent inhumanity of the slanted modern mind. And on this particular occasion I feared, beyond explanation, that the coincidence of these events with our own movements could not have been so precise unless we were, unwittingly, off the beat of some mean of time in our own spirits.

  ‘What are you all saying?’ Spode now asked in French, his voice still gruff with sleep.

  I told him at length. He listened without comment, his eyes sombre and without surprise of any kind.

  When we went to the small radio station which daily linked Maun to the outside world for one hour, I sent a telegram, among others, to Molly and Cyril Challis in Francistown asking them to meet Stonehouse on his arrival and help him on his way home to Johannesburg. Jeremiah sent an expensive telegram to his wife and son reading: ‘I greet my son and you. We have arrived with God in health and safety at Maun and with God we go on today.’ Ben telegraphed to his home for a forecast of rain. Vyan inquired after the health of his hump-backed cattle. Spode, though I knew it only months later, sent a telegram to our mutual friend to the effect: ‘I commit my child to your care stop fear I shall not come out of it alive.’

  Simon Stonehouse did not want to send a telegram and lay in bed so disappointed that he barely said good-bye to me. Charles, too, had no message to send. Like a long distance runner with mind and breath only for the race, he spent the morning refuelling, oil
ing, greasing, and otherwise tending his beloved engines with such effect that soon after noon our Land-Rovers were humming along the track like bees with syrup hastening back to their hive.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Swamp of Despond

  Now that the routine of camping was clearly established, we spent two whole days travelling until sundown. For the first day the new arrangement of Comfort helping Spode seemed to work miracles. But on the second there was a regression. Comfort came drifting back to my side and I had to give him the orders I imagined Spode would like instead of Spode himself taking control. Charles, however, to my delight distinguished himself by spotting long before any of the veterans, a twenty-foot python looking like a stocking filled for Christmas, dragging itself ponderously through the bush. Armed only with a stick he tried gallantly to head it off and turn it back towards Spode to film, but the serpent was not willing.

  Soon after sunrise on the second day out from Maun I was startled to hear an outburst of rapid gunfire ahead of me. I came to Ben’s Land-Rover abandoned in the track with three dead wild dogs lying close beside it. Some moments later Ben and John reappeared dragging two more dead dogs after them. It was an extraordinary demonstration of Ben’s quick ractions and accuracy as a rifleman: five shots at five of the swiftest animals in Africa and all five fatal. Ben’s sun-lined face had a benign expression on it. I believe of all natural things he hated only the wild dogs for their ruthless ways with weaker animals. He climbed back into his vehicle like a horseman swinging into his saddle, and we were off again.

  Towards evening of the same day we reached a small rest camp, used by the recruiting organization of the Mines, called Sepopa: the place of the eddies. It was on the edge of the swamp about ninety miles by water below the entrance to the Okovango delta, and the terminal of a small ferry service run by the mines between south and north banks of the marshes. I knew that close by there lived the remnants of a race of dug-out or makorro men. As there was still an hour or two of daylight I went on alone to see if I could contact their headman, a veteran renowned for his travels by makorro and with the musical-sounding name of Karuso, as well as the honorary title among Africans of ‘King of Paddlers’. I did not find him. Instead I met a man, a home-made axe upon his shoulders, walking out of the bush into a long savannah of buffalo grass restless under the tuneful air of evening. He reminded me of a city dweller, umbrella in hand, out for a stroll in the park after a day in the office. To my amazement he knew me at once, said that the ‘big master from Muhembo’ had been there the day before to see Karuso, and that already dug-outs and paddlers, of whom he was going to be one, were standing by down-river.

  I slept the better for the axe-man’s news and had, that night, an especially vivid dream. I was in the centre of a great swamp. The sun was setting. Between me and the red of evening rose an enormous tree with a smooth straight trunk rising some hundreds of feet and with its branches and leaves filling much of the sky. In the dream I recognized it as the final object of my search.

  Next morning I rose early to tell the others I was leaving them to rest at Sepopa and going on alone to Muhembo. I asked Spode to select only what films he would need in the swamp and took the rest to store in Muhembo. Though there were only two European couples and three bachelors in Muhembo it was a transit depot of great importance to the mines. From all over the roadless country beyond in northern South-West Africa and Angola, year in, year out, sturdy black men made their way towards Muhembo on foot through bush and swamp to apply for work in the mines. I had known it years before, when the men were taken in trucks nine hundred miles or so over the wasteland to the railway of Francistown. But now, whenever their numbers justified it, they were collected by aircraft and flown in a few hours over a distance that had previously taken weeks.

  Both the two lone Europeans who administered the depôt were at the airstrip when I arrived. Most of the African population of the village was there too. As always there were many women and children because the able-bodied men were away earning money to pay taxes and buy food. They were an attractive people. They had smooth, shining black skins with a gleam of raven’s wing in the sun on their broad shoulders and long supple legs. The short peppercorn hair of the women was made longer by plaits of fine, black fibre, skilfully woven into it and falling in straight strands to their smooth shoulders. They were naked to the waist and their firm breasts fully exposed. Round their stomachs they wore a kilt made of plaited fibre and beads drawn into patterns of shining black and white. Their faces were illuminated with the feeling that accompanied their animated talk. Their voices were low and when one caught a dark eye it looked at one instantly not as a stranger but as a woman, before the frankness of its own gaze made it shy and a head was quickly turned away. They looked, indeed, more like one of the Libyan tribes vivid in the gossip of Herodotus than a crowd assembled to greet an aeroplane. Yet there they were hemming in the airstrip and their numbers growing as eager new arrivals emerged from the end of a red footpath on the edge of the flaming bush. In the centre of the crowd were two lone European topees, like lobster pots adrift on a dark sea. Their owners, however, I found, were anchored and at home, ready in exchange of wit and good humour with the crowd.

  ‘They love this moment,’ the senior of the two told me. ‘They even know something about flying that we don’t! It’s humiliating but true. They stand there and can tell from the way the plane approaches which pilot is flying it! You’ll hear them say: “Oh, that’s the bald-headed one coming today,” or “That’s the one with the fire on his head”, “Hippobelly”, “Red-nose”, “Shining face”, “A new one” and heaven knows what! But you can be sure they’ll be right.’

  When the aircraft had come and gone we went to this official’s house on the river, where we sat on the veranda among a vast though oddly-ordered chaos of books, magazines, fishing-rods, spoons and flies, and all the paraphernalia that had helped him travel the long years, alone, without injury to his spirit. Almost at our feet, the great Okovango river broke into splinters on the pointed papyrus mat at the door of the swamps. Beyond the green of the marshes the bush of the Northern Kalahari sandveld burned like coal in the fire of the day, which we saw as though through a sheet of Venetian glass, glowing because of the essence of silver water feverishly extracted by the sun.

  ‘It’s beginning to get hot early this year,’ my host said with a suspicion of foreboding in his voice all the more alarming considering the many seasons he had seen coming and going in that place. ‘But, first, let me tell you what I’ve done for you.’

  He had been to see Karuso and provisionally engaged dugouts and paddlers. They were standing by at a place called Ikwagga just below Sepopa. He had left me to settle the terms but they would take me where I wanted to go if the state of water permitted. But the funny thing was, already they had seemed to know where I was going. They were convinced I was looking for the unknown tree in the swamps. ‘Good Heavens!’ I exclaimed, remembering my dream of the night before. ‘Why a tree?’

  He explained that deep in the swamps there was an enormous tree, unlike any other tree in the rest of the country. It had as yet no name nor was it known to what species it belonged, but it was called ‘the unknown tree’ by all.

  ‘Well, I’ve not come for that!’ I laughed.

  He nodded and said I could work that one out with Karuso. What really concerned him was my intention to travel so far by dug-out at that time of the year. He begged me not to do so. The swamp was alive with crocodile and hippo. Every year the hippo were more and more aggressive because they had been hunted constantly and badly. Man was now taken, on sight, as an enemy. Only three weeks before, just where the river bent like a cutlass of stainless steel, a hippo had upset a makorro and bitten a man in half. A week before a boy had lost a leg in the same way. So it went on. He asked why not compromise? He had a launch built with timbers stout enough to resist any attack by hippo. It had a small ferry service to run once a week, but he was willing to let me have it
for cost price working between schedules. He suggested I should take it as far as the water allowed and then use makorros. ‘In the shallows you’ll have a chance,’ he concluded, ‘but in the deeper channels I wouldn’t put a penny of my money on you.’

  He then called in his colleague and for some hours the two of them told me all they could about the swamp. I owe much to what they told me of their unique experience. When I left ‘The Place of the Eddies’ I carried written instructions to the ferryman to place himself under my orders.

  The next day we sailed in the launch soon after sunrise. John and Cheruyiot, whom we had left behind with our Land-Rovers and main baggage, waved to us sadly because they too longed to come. Soon the main stream carried us away from the bushveld banks and into long, deep channels between tall papyrus growth. The smooth, cool, effortless passage over even water after days of hot dusty bumping and bucking eased our troubled senses. Everyone was in a good humour and instantly nicknamed the solemn skipper and his lively engineman ‘Grumpy’ and ‘Shorty’ respectively. Every now and then, away to the south, some high thrust of green over the roof of river forest rose like an explosion of cumulus, uncurling in the dynamic blue. Occasionally the dead stump of a gigantic tree stood out, bare, above the papyrus and reeds bent double with birds, like some bone of pre-Okovango history, and inevitably it wore a gleaming fish-eagle on its top. Giant herons, crested water-birds, hammerheads, kingfishers, crimson bee-eaters, the royal Barotse egrets, and sometimes even sky blue African rollers rose everywhere out of the resounding reeds. Each bay cut in a cliff of green was ardent with white and blue lilies’ hearts, open with abandon to bumble and sun. From one lily leaf to another, lying flat on the surface raced long-legged trotter birds, a silver dust of water at the heels, to cut off translucent insects from refuge in the papyrus shadows. All the time, above the chug-chug of our small engine, the air was loud with the nostalgic call of bird and water-fowl. The sandy spits in the deeper bays were compact with streamlined crocodile. They lay on the sands, eyes shut with delight, mouths wide open while adroit little birds picked their ivory teeth clean of meat. ‘Shorty’, who clearly hated them, begged us to shoot. But we refused. All we shot for dinner were some duck, when they rose like stars from some exclusive water.