The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  However ears and nostrils, like two toads on the water, remained still long enough for us to reach the channel between the home lagoon and the next. The channel was just wide enough to take our makorros. My companions laid down their paddles and produced their long forked punting poles. To my relief they managed to push our slender craft with little loss of speed through the reeds and sedges. These rose to a height of about ten feet all around us. I could not see through them at all, and their spurred tops waved rhythmically over the bowed heads of my tall companions. The sky itself was reduced to another blue-black channel as if it were a narrowed reflection of the water below in a mirror above. Suddenly the blue vanished, the channel became a tunnel through columns of branches of interwoven trees. The startled eyes of a baboon looked into mine from a perch fifteen feet above. It let out a booming bark of warning and immediately the silence was broken by the crashes and screams of an invisible multitude of baboons leaping wildly from branch to branch out of our way.

  ‘Oh! You thing of evil,’ Long-axe exclaimed, aggrieved. ‘What is the use of us keeping so silent when you cry ‘Beware!’ so loudly to the world, and that not even to a world of your friends?’

  For a hundred yards or more we poled our way with difficulty through the intricate tunnel to emerge once more into an open channel between tall reeds. A quarter of a mile on we reached a great open lagoon where we looked on many miles of islands set in silver water. We took once more to the paddle. Our guide seemed to have no hesitations about the way and set his course like a homing pigeon. The wind of our increased speed was cool in our hair and on our faces. As always, for fear of attack by hippo in deep water, the paddlers never slackened until they were near shelter of some kind. On the far side we entered another channel and so it went on for some hours, lagoon, channel, and once more lagoon. Only the channels became narrower and the lagoons broader and shallower. About one o’clock, perhaps sixteen miles from the home lagoon, we found the passage east shut against us.

  Our guide put his punting pole down firmly and said: ‘If we cannot enter here, Moren, we’ll have to lift and carry the makorros for two days before we find water deep enough again to go on.’

  We had clearly come to the highest and most solid part of the swamp. Much as I would have liked to go on to Maun by water, I was not over-disappointed. We were through the outer defences, across the last moat, and within the inmost keep of this formidable stronghold of ancient life. If there were River Bushmen still to be found in organized entities it would be here among the sparkling islands rising now everywhere out of the burning water. Behind screens of elegant reeds and sedges and fringes of palms, their dense bush and gleaming crown of lofty wood stood out resolutely in the blue.

  ‘Do you think there could be any people there?’ I asked our guide. I did not mention Bushmen specifically, because I had become daily more superstitious about too direct an approach in so indirect a world.

  ‘Sometimes, perhaps two, perhaps three,’ he said, gravely dubious, knowing what I meant.

  ‘Where do you think would be the best shade to rest for a while then, and perhaps find a buck or two to shoot before we go home?’ I went on, pressing him no further.

  At that a look of new life came into his eyes and a low laugh broke from him. He jumped into the water, swung the makorro round so fast without warning that Long-axe was nearly thrown off his balance, climbed quickly in and raced across to the north where a long slope of yellow winter grass went slowly up from green reeds to clumps of dense black high wood. So slight were all gradients in the swamp that we had to disembark a hundred yards from the edge of the lagoon and wade ankledeep ashore, leaving the makorros caught in the reeds. Instinctively no one spoke but conveyed their meaning by signs. The water was so hot it almost burned my cooler ankles and at the first touch of the fiery island earth I put on my boots. How still the island was! And yet I had an odd feeling that some kind of vibration was running there through the shining air, as if somewhere within these black woods a powerful dynamo was running to charge the lonely place with electricity. My companions seemed aware of it too, for as I took my gun from Comfort to move off towards the clumps of wood, the paddlers, each with a long throwing spear in hand, began hotly disputing with one another as to who should lead the way.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I whispered to Comfort.

  ‘They’re afraid of buffalo, Moren,’ he said. ‘No one likes being in the lead when there might be buffalo about.’

  Tired of the dispute, Long-axe turned his broad shoulders disdainfully on the others and, with a superb look of scorn on his broad, open young face, walked to the front. But I held him back and called the guide.

  ‘This is your place,’ I commanded him in a whisper. ‘You are the guide. You go ahead and I’ll follow immediately behind you.’ He looked as if he would still demur but he was at heart a fair person and the justice, as much as the note of command, compelled him. Perhaps I should have paused a moment then to let the turmoil of the dispute subside within him. However, I let him walk straight on, his long spear in hand, but not looking about him as attentively as he should have done. I followed, with Comfort next and the paddlers in single file behind him.

  We walked thus for about a quarter of a mile. All the while I felt increasingly uneasy and aware of the odd vibration and crackle of electricity charging the shining element of the high noon-day air. Carefully as I looked around me I saw no fresh spoor of any kind, and I am certain none of the others did or they would have warned me. None the less because of my growing uneasiness I was about to halt our small procession, when it happened.

  We were in a round, hollow depression up to our chins in yellow grass and approaching the centre of the island. All around us were dense copses of black trees sealed with shadow and invariably wearing a feather of palm in their peaked caps. Suddenly the guide slapped his neck loudly with the flat of his hand. I myself felt the unmistakable stab of a tsetse fly on my own neck and thought: ‘If there’s fly here, buffalo can’t be far away.’

  At that precise moment the copses all around us burst apart and buffalo, who had been within, sleeping, came hurtling through their crackling sides with arched necks, thundering hooves, and flying tails, all with the ease and speed of massed acrobats breaking hoops of paper to tumble into the arena for the finale of some great circus.

  The guide dropped his spear, instantly fell flat on his stomach and wriggled away into the grass. So did the paddlers. Comfort stood his ground only long enough to call out to me hoarsely: ‘Master, throw your gun away. Let’s crawl on our hands and knees and pretend to be animals nibbling the grass. It’s our only chance.’

  However, I stood my ground because, in some strange way, now that my uneasiness was explained I was not afraid. Perhaps I knew, too, it would be useless to run. But whatever the reason, I remember only a kind of exultation at witnessing so truly wild and privileged a sight. Automatically I slammed a cartridge into the breech of my gun and held it ready on my arm while the copses all round me went on exploding and the ground began to shake and tremble under my feet. For one minute it looked as if some buffalo, coming up from behind me, were going to run me down. But at the last minute they divided and passed not ten yards on either side of me. From all points and at every moment, their number was added to until the yellow grass and the glade far beyond ran black with buffalo, as if a bottle of indian ink had been spilt over it. They took to the channel ahead in a solid black lump, like a ship being launched, throwing up a mighty splash of white water over the reeds before they vanished round a curve of the main wood. I thought with strange regret, ‘They have gone’, and stood turning over in my exalted senses the tumultuous impression of their black hooves slinging clay at the blue; bowed Mithraic heads and purple horns cleaving grass and reeds and spray of thorn like the prows of dark ships of the Odyssey on the sea of a long Homeric summer; deep eyes so intent with the inner vision driving them that they went by me unseeingly.

  Suddenly there was anot
her crackle of paper wood behind me. A smaller copse burst open and the greatest bull I have ever seen came charging straight at me.

  The paddlers and Comfort, who were all miraculously reappearing, formed a kind of Greek chorus round me, shouting over and over again: ‘Shoot, Master! Shoot, Father! Shoot, Chief of Chiefs! It’s the lone one! It’s the lone bull!’

  Yet again I held my fire, though for a different reason, and such a fantastic one that I must apologize for it in advance. When my paddlers shouted ‘Shoot!’ I knew they were right. Here, even if safety did not seem to command it, was a chance to ensure our supply of food for days to come. But all my life I have dreamed about one particular buffalo. Much as I love the lion, elephant, kudu, and eland, the animal closest to the earth and with most of the quintessence of Africa in its being is for me the buffalo of the serene marble brow. Ever since I have been a small boy I have dreamed of one particular buffalo above all buffaloes. I will not enlarge on all the fantastic situations in which my dreaming mind has encountered him, and the great and little-known stretches of the continent in which my eyes have, for years, sought him with a growing hunger. All that matters is that unless absolutely forced to, I could not shoot on this occasion because here, at last, was the buffalo of my dreams. He took shape as a lone bull charging at me, the purple noon-day light billowing like silk around him. He came straight at me, so close that at last, reluctantly, I was about to put my gun to my shoulder and shoot.

  For the second time my companions vanished. Then the buffalo abruptly swerved aside, and charged by me so close that his smell, the lost smell of the devout animal age before man, went acid in my nose.

  I stood there watching him vanish like a man seeing his manhood in the field die down before him, thinking: ‘Only one thing saved me. I was not afraid. Because of that I belonged to them and the overall purpose of the day. In their magnetic deeps they knew it. But afraid, no gun or friend on earth could have saved me.’

  I came to, trembling all over with the fear of what would have happened if I had been afraid, to hear the guide, sufficiently relieved to find himself alive to be mockingly reproachful of me, saying: ‘There was meat there you know, Master, for many days.’ His voice sounded as if he were far away and not rising out of the grass near me. I gave no answer but walked over to where the others were uttering cries of astonishment over the spoor of the lone bull.

  ‘Look!’ Comfort exclaimed, pointing to the puncture in the clay behind each of the rear hoof-prints. ‘Look how deep his after-claws have pierced the clay!’

  The buffalo, once he has stunned his enemies with head and horn, likes to give them the coup de grâce with the pointed dagger he carries in a leather sheath at the heels of his hind legs. But none of us had ever seen after-claws so long as these.

  ‘Auck!’ Long-axe said, shaking his head and his voice gentle as a woman’s with wonder. ‘He must be the Chief of their Chiefs!’

  But Samutchoso was looking more at me, not the spoor. In the same tone of awe that he had used the evening before when I shot the lechwe, he said quietly, certain of his meaning: ‘He knew you, Master. He recognized you and knowing you turned aside.’

  After that we tried to rest in the nearest shadows but the shade-loving tsetse fly soon drove us out to seek relief in the hot sun. I made no attempt to hunt because I was certain the alarm raised by the buffalo would have stampeded the game for many miles around. In fact we were hardly back in the open when a baboon, now thoroughly on the alert, spotted us and broadcast a loud warning to the bush below him. Instead we did a complete circuit of the island to look for signs of human occupation. We found none except, well above flood-water level, the remains of three ancient makorros, unlike our paddlers’ of flat-bottomed design, slowly rotted and rotting in the grass.

  ‘Massarwa! Bushmen!’ Samutchoso, who seemed more aware of my main purpose than the others, explained unbidden as he came to stand sharing my absorption beside me.

  All this time I noticed that the nerves of my companions had been sorely tried by the encounter with the buffalo. Whenever a baboon frantically rattled a palm in the silence, or a foraging party of indefatigable termites dropped a dry limb from a dead tree to crash in the bush below, they started violently and appeared ready to run. They followed me into the dark main wood with reluctance, and sought the daylight beyond with the eagerness of a vivid apprehension. Their relief when we rounded the circle where we had left the makorros among the motionless rushes, and started back for camp, made them chant with joy as they bent down to take up their paddles. However, I lay on my back in the bottom of the craft, looking deeply up into the blue channel of the sky framed between the trembling reed tips above me, with my heart and mind still so much in the scene with the buffalo that I had no room even for the negative answer implicit in the rotting Bushman dug-outs on the island. I felt that the encounter had for a moment made me immediate, and had, all too briefly, closed a dark time-gap in myself. With our twentieth-century selves we have forgotten the importance of being truly and openly primitive. We have forgotten the art of our legitimate beginnings. We no longer know how to close the gap between the far past and the immediate present in ourselves. We need primitive nature, the First Man in ourselves, it seems, as the lungs need air and the body food and water; yet we can only achieve it by a slinking often shameful, back-door entrance. I thought finally that of all the nostalgias that haunt the human heart the greatest of them all, for me, is an everlasting longing to bring what is youngest home to what is oldest, in us all.

  I was lifted out of this mood by the sight of an aeroplane coming down the centre of the blue channel above me like a translucent insect about to be burned in the yellow lamp of the sun. I was told by the pilot later that it was full of primitive black people on their way from Muhembo to the distant gold mines. Far down on the swamp we moved in the slow, ancient way. But above, with the blazing afternoon water hurling long spears of copper and bronze light at their eyes, the black travellers sang incessantly, for reassurance, the one hymn, ‘Abide with me’, which the missionary priests, the medicine men of the peoples who built the magic plane, had taught them. They sang it so loudly that the pilot heard it above the noise in his cockpit. But from where I lay I heard only the engines droning discordantly among sounds dedicated to a world before and beyond us all.

  So we came home in the evening, the smoke of our camp-fires blue among the lofty tree-tops. Since morning two vultures had taken up their position on the summits of two of the highest of them. They were starkly outlined against the red of the sunset and made an ominous impression. The moment we walked into the camp I knew it was more than an impression. Coming back content and still somewhat exalted by all that had happened in a long and exacting day, I did not know at first what had happened. The paddlers, with few exceptions, were huddled round their fires cooking the remains of my lechwe and when they saw we brought no meat looked up to give us no greeting but only a long sullen stare. Both Charles and Spode were already in bed under their mosquito nets, and Ben and Vyan, coming to greet me, looked very tired and thoroughly downhearted.

  ‘We’ve been all over the country,’ Vyan said wearily, ‘and found nothing to shoot at. The paddlers are pretty fed-up and poor old Charles has had to go to bed with a bad attack of lumbago.’

  ‘And he?’ I asked, pointing to Spode’s net.

  ‘Oh! He, poor fellow,’ answered Ben, who slept near him, ‘says he was kept awake all night by wild beasts prowling round his bed and went to rest soon after we returned to camp this morning.’

  I went to once to doctor Charles, who was lying uncomplaining but in great pain from an affliction he had not had before. I then woke Spode and persuaded him to join the others for an evening drink inside a large mosquito net, fifteen feet long, twelve feet wide, and twelve feet high that I had designed for just such an occasion. We sat there safe from mosquito attack and soon the drink, the smell of Jeremiah’s dinner on the fire, and our exchanges of the day’s news brought into
being a mellow objectivity. After Spode’s first laugh I went out to hold my nightly sick parade among the paddlers. Samutchoso and the rest of my party appeared to be remonstrating with unusual vehemence with those who had stayed at home. However, when they saw me they fell silent and began, half-embarrassed, to come forward with their slight ailments.

  When I had finished I thought the atmosphere seemed lighter, and Karuso felt free to ask: ‘Please get us more meat. We’re not getting enough food.’

  ‘First thing in the morning,’ I promised him, and walked back to our communal net white in the darkness.

  Tired, we all crept into our nets immediately after eating, and whenever I woke I heard the hippo-bull of the night before stamping and huffing and puffing with rising resentment around our beds. Once when he sounded almost on top of me I flashed my torch in his direction. The moon was rising. Though reeds and trees were too dense to reveal his shape, his eyes showed up long, slanted, and emerald green. Towards morning he seemed to accept us and withdrew to the moonlit waters with resignation. Thereafter, I believe, he learnt even to enjoy our company and the change in routine that our presence provided. He visited us nightly, announcing his arrival with a loud crash through the wing of reeds, a fat boy trying to make our flesh creep with fierce puffs of breath. For a while he would study us from all angles and then return, full of simple wonder, to his soft water, where he made solemn and reverential noises at the moon. Because he appeared alone, and celibate, and was full of devout utterance I called him Augustine, after one of my favourite saints, who I am certain would have been the first to understand since he, too, had been a bishop of Hippo. Unfortunately Spode found no joy in our hippo. He kept Spode awake for hours and in all his larded innocence added greatly to our problems.

  At first light, when I took my companions their coffee with the intention of asking Vyan and Ben to go out hunting before breakfast, I found Vyan with his feet so afflicted by protracted immersion in the swamp waters that I could not think of suggesting it to him. Ben, too, looked out of his net with a flushed face, a hand shaking with fever, and a look of tightly withheld suffering on his sun-lined face. He had a high temperature and told me he had been bitten by a poisonous spider that had crept between his blankets. It lay in the earth beside his bed so crushed that it was not recognizable, but its bite clearly was dangerous. I had antidotes effective for any snake or serpent bite but knew of nothing for this kind of spider. I could only insist on his keeping quiet and drugging his pain. Charles was paralysed in the grip of lumbago. That left only Spode and me among the Europeans, and Spode arose sombre with another enigmatic variation of humour. With so much suffering around, his mood did not strike me as a gratuitous complication and for the last time I insisted on his carrying out the programme we had agreed upon. I gave the paddlers for breakfast such meat as we had left, hurried through our own so as not to miss the light for filming and, with Comfort to help me, I acted as assistant to Spode while he made some individual studies of the paddlers in camp. That was soon over. Then I asked Spode to accompany me with his camera for the rest of the day.