The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  Before I could stop him he let out a wild exultant yell and waved his paddle in the air. As a result when we reached the island it was as quiet and deserted as a churchyard at midnight. The fire, however, was still smouldering and beyond it, tucked securely among the trees, were three substantial grass huts. The screens over their entrances were firmly held in place by bits of dead wood, but the grass was trodden down and littered with the waste-products of a prolonged occupation. The guide gave the huts only the briefest of glances before he ran off deeper into the island, calling out loudly in friendly tones in a tongue of his own.

  ‘They are not far away,’ Samutchoso said, squatting by the fire. ‘No men, only women and children.’

  I did not ask how he could tell so much from so little but he was right. Half an hour later our guide reappeared leading two shy, almost frightened women by the hand, while behind came half a dozen children. They were dressed only in blankets of skin and wore no ornaments of any kind, and to my private disappointment neither of them owned the face I had seen above the water. It is true they had clear traces of Bushman blood, and some of the children with light yellow skins, high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, looked like pure models of their Bushman prototype. I had hardly time to make the women a present of tobacco and give the children a tin of old-fashioned ‘hum-bugs’, before the elder of the two disappeared into one of the huts to come back with a large heap of sun-dried Okovango bream which she thrust upon us with both hands and shining eyes. The men, they told us, had gone away some moons before to trade skins somewhere on the perimeter of the swamps for tobacco. They had no idea when they would return and meanwhile they manned the fishing traps and maintained themselves and their children alone and unarmed, without fear or complaint, in a world where I would not have liked to go without modern weapons. They had, they said, no neighbours and they knew of no Bushman communities. Since they could remember they had always been just themselves, their menfolk, and their dead parents. They followed us down to the water reluctant, now that their fears were at rest, to let us go.

  I myself felt oddly cheated by such an end to our first encounter with human beings in the swamp. I had kept on looking over my shoulder for the true Bushman face I thought I had seen among the reeds. I did not realize how much I had counted on meeting it again, and was almost irritable with unbelief that now I had to leave without seeing it.

  Then, at the last moment, a call clear and vibrant as a bell came from across the channel. The women and children all instantly replied and beckoned wildly with their hands, the youngest jumping up and down in excitement. A flat-bottomed makorro suddenly darted out of the reeds and made straight for us. In it, alone and naked to the waist, paddle in hand, came the young woman whose face I had first seen among the reeds. The makorro was loaded with tender shoots of all kinds, and the moment it grounded the children pounced on the cargo and began chewing white water roots like sugar-cane. A young woman of the purest classical Bushman colour and features stepped out and, paddle clasped to her firm breasts, looked with shy inquiry about her.

  ‘Please tell her’, I asked the guide, while Comfort’s dark eyes went white with amazement, ‘that I greet her and that I have seen her before.’

  She turned her head sideways, smiled politely into her hand, and said almost inaudibly to the guide: ‘I see him and know him too.’

  I would have liked to stay and question her but for the moment the reward of having proved the reality of the vision seemed more than enough. Also it was getting late. Thinking to come back with Spode to film this brave little group in their daily setting, I asked the guide to explain that we would return soon with real presents for them all. We said good-bye and when we vanished down the breach in the papyrus dyke we could still see the dark little group motionless where we had left them on the shining foreshore between fire and island lump.

  ‘You are not thinking of coming to film these people as well as the honey-bird?’ Comfort called out half-mockingly in English from behind me. He was teasing me out of kindness, but touched me so accurately on the raw that I barely held back the retort he did not deserve. It was well I succeeded, for in fact I never saw the people or their island again.

  That night I worked harder than ever to put our island camp at ease. I never had over-promising material in the paddlers, but I did not seek the explanation there. I was convinced that the responsibility lay first with me, and then in our European midst. The paddlers, with the vulnerability of primitive people to a more conscious human atmosphere, were merely picking up all that was negative in our situation, namely the depression caused by the ailments inflicted on my white companions, and what I took to be Spode’s failure to play his own constructive and contracted role. Charles, Ben, and Vyan were all on the way to recovery, but the atmosphere round Spode was as disturbing as ever. Again he had lain inert under his blankets for much of that day. He did not speak unless spoken to, and his handsome face was so charged with resentment, hurt, and disapproval of such an unexplained and unfathomable kind, that it sent my own determined heart into my boots. What effect then must not his appearance and example have had on the primitive paddlers? I made one more supreme effort that evening, therefore, to talk and jolly Spode into something positive, only to wake up in the morning to find it had all been in vain. Indeed, from the start of that day everything seemed to go wrong.

  Spode, when I talked to him about filming the group of women and the honey-bird, said irritably: ‘You don’t ever understand, Laurens! I haven’t the strength today. Je n’ai pas de force. . . .Perhaps tomorrow.’

  Hard upon this Charles, whose nerves had been sorely tried by inactivity and pain, made his one and only scene with me because Vyan had used an enamel coffee mug as a shaving bowl! This was followed by Comfort drawing me aside and saying that the paddlers were more than ever convinced that the launch would not come for us. Further, the guide had warned him that a small group among them were saying that if that happened they would kill us at night, throw us to the crocodiles, and take themselves out of the swamp the easiest way.

  ‘Don’t believe such nonsense,’ I said shortly. ‘And I order you not to repeat one word of such rubbish to anyone else.’

  ‘Of course I do not believe it,’ he-answered, laughing without conviction: ‘I tell you merely to show you what sort of people they are here. But there is one thing I do not like, Moren. At first when I was among them they always spoke in Sechuana. Now they always speak the swamp dialect so that I cannot understand what they are saying.’

  I did not take Comfort’s report of the paddlers’ threat seriously. It was, I was convinced, only an extreme symptom of a general sense of frustration and negation in the island camp. None the less I took precautions. I decided to stay in camp myself all day and to keep with me the men with whom I had developed a bond during the past few days. Their presence I was certain would help to create a better atmosphere. For the rest I proposed to break up in smaller groups the men who had idled longest round the camp-fires. Nothing more disconcerts the mass mind, particularly the negative mass mind, than to see its numbers reduced and its cohesion attenuated. I picked six of the most divergent characters and sent them off hunting with spears and an old shot-gun. I asked Vyan and Charles also to take out parties, and gave Charles my gun. That done, I proposed to have a serious talk with Spode. But he had already gone back to bed and appeared asleep. Thinking I could leave that until he woke in the afternoon, I went and talked at some length to each of the men left in the camp. Spode was still asleep when I finished, and all chance of having a quiet hour with him to myself vanished when the parties of hunters started coming back in the early afternoon, all with the same total lack of success.

  Up to that moment I had thought my plan was serving its purpose well, but I was disconcerted to see how quickly the camp became despondent again. As a result I went out once more in the evening with my gun and the proved makorro crews. My luck continued to hold and at sundown I managed to bring off another extremely
difficult shot. By my native Boer standards I have never regarded myself as anything except an average shot. Yet that evening I was shooting in an inspired ‘Rider Haggard’ class and to this day the way I shot, the manner wherein I acquired the gun, and the full extent to which it served the imperative mood of that part of the journey, for me holds something supernatural. I still do not like to think of what our plight might have been had I not had that gun and shot with it as I did. For days it was the only positive force in our midst, and the decisive factor in our fortunes. I do not know what the paddlers might not have done had it not enabled me to feed them so well. I shot with it nine times and killed eight buck. I shot twice at the same target only to put a fatally wounded animal out of pain. Once I used Vyan’s shot-gun to kill, with unlikely duck-shot, a wart-hog, one of the toughest animals in Africa. Stranger still, I seemed the only person able to find game. All the others, black and white, failed though I kept them busy hunting as a matter of policy. Yet whenever I went out, even into areas just vacated by other disappointed hunters, I would find game enough and to spare. These factors in the sum of our sealed-off period in the swamp served to rally the random emotions on the fickle island. I knew without question that those who hunted with me, particularly Samutchoso, were overawed by my success, and when they held the gun their fingers curled reverently about it as if it were a living and magnetic object. And of course I, too, was endowed with something of the gun’s ‘magic’. The effect on my own spirit was considerable and gave me such confidence in belonging to the purpose of all around me that neither the intractable paddlers, nor my utter failure with Spode, could undermine it.

  And so the long days went slowly by. Spode never filmed for us again and became more than ever silent. I never had my serious talk alone with him. I pressed him no more. I remembered all the hours which, at the end of the day, I had devoted to building a bridge between himself, myself, and the others, all the efforts I had made to amuse, interest, appease, and stimulate him into becoming an active member of the expedition. I realized that perhaps I’d done too much of it, and that to try and carry him beyond his natural limits had made me neglect other duties. I had given priority to his moods and taken the others, even the paddlers, somewhat for granted. I had talked to Spode and thought about him when Ben, Charles, and the paddlers could have done with more of my time and imagination. So now I left him alone to make his own terms with the trust that had been put in him, and to find his own unsolicited and natural level. What I had of spare time I now gave to the others. Henceforth I made a point of talking at some length to each person in the camp each day, and when it became clear to me, as it had long been clear to Comfort and the others, that Spode was not going to work on his own prompting, I sent the guide with a special party to the little group of women we had discovered with presents to barter for more of their delicate bream. I sent another party to contact the honey-diviner. They came back at evening with the dark combs the bird had enabled them to find in a disused termite mound. I myself, sadly, gave up all the exploring I loved so deeply and concentrated on keeping the camp fed and in hand.

  On the first day on which we could expect the launch, I took the precaution of telling everyone that I was not expecting it for another four days. I gave them all sundry tasks to do for distraction, yet I found myself, towards evening, continually listening for the sound of a diesel engine coming down the scarlet channel. It did not come that day nor the next, and on the third the atmosphere in the island was at its most ominous. I had the greatest difficulty in dispatching the hunters. Everyone, even Spode, who for once did not stay in bed, wanted to hang about, on the look-out, by the water-front. If it had not been for Vyan and Ben smoking, talking, and imperturbably going about the tasks of the day, Comfort’s disciplined presence, my hunter companions, and Jeremiah tending his pots and pans as if he were truly at home, I would have felt utterly bleak. Jeremiah was, perhaps, the most impressive of all. Frequently I found him smiling to himself over his pots and pans, so often indeed that I had to ask him why he was always smiling.

  ‘I was thinking of my son, Master,’ he said with a laugh of sheer contentment. ‘He is a very, very clever boy.’

  As the red sun sank close to the papyrus spikes standing rigidly between us and the west like green railings round a green park, the disconsolate watchers at the water-front began to drift back to their evening fires.

  ‘The launch won’t be here before tomorrow at the earliest,’ I mocked Comfort openly. To myself I thought: ‘If it’s not here in two days’ time, I’ll have to go out with the guide to see what’s wrong.’

  Just then a great shout went up from the river bank. In a second the camp was empty. The pulse of the launch’s engine beat faintly though steadily in the evening air. I remained sitting underneath a tree upon which Comfort had carved my name some days before. A disgruntled paddler had asked him what he was doing, and with a cheerful laugh he’d replied: ‘Writing a history of the camp so that when we do not come back the people who come looking for us will know why!’

  I looked up gratefully now to the tender blue sky far above the great branches, and noticed that the number of vultures since our arrival had increased to five. The unaccustomed sound of the launch approaching, however, had made them stir uneasily. On tip-toe, with ruffled feathers and long scraggy necks stretched out, they appeared amazed and cheated. Just then one of the older paddlers, whom before I had hardly noticed, left the others and came to stand shyly in front of me. He held out a walking stick carved out of yellow island wood and said: ‘Please, Master, I made this for you.’ I took it in both hands, humbled that someone in the midst of his own predicament had given thought also to me. Only at that moment did I realize what a strain the whole thing had been.

  The next morning at dark we left our island. As I went round the camp for the last time to scatter sand on our dying fires, I thought Augustine’s exhortation in the reeds were hoarse with protest at our going. At dawn we passed through miles of burnt-out papyrus water, and I was amazed to see how confidently the shy Setatunga antelope of the inmost swamp walked across the parched surface. At one place Vyan shot a buck at the meatless ferryman’s request, and Samutchoso and Long-axe walked out on the pitted papyrus mat to get it in.

  We caught up with the fire standing high in flame and smoke on the edge of the main channel. Opposite it burnt another, as fierce and ruthless. I would not have thought it possible that green, water-fed fuel could burn with such abandon. The heat in mid-stream was intense. The water at one point was churning like porridge with mice, rats, snakes, and reptiles cruising frantically backwards and forwards from bank to bank looking for shelter from the flames. Above the leaping heat the sky was flashing with the spark and glitter of a fire all its own. Crimson bee-eaters swiftly dived around the roaring conflagration to pick off the insects taking to the air for safety on wings of shining glass. We went slowly against the current through the narrow gateway of fire like beings leaving a legendary world after a fateful argosy. For a long time I stood high in my old position in the prow watching the tallest flames fade, until at last a thick curtain of smoke came down between the central swamp and ourselves.

  We travelled until after midnight before resting. Then we set off again early the next morning to arrive at ‘The Place of the Eddies’ by evening. All the while Spode sat silent and apart. He spoke to no one and seemed incapable even of making his bed. I had to do it for him. He looked most unhappy and his grey eyes were filled with conflict. However, no sooner were we safe on firm, dry mainland than some power of decision returned to him. I was helping Jeremiah to get hot tea and food because everyone was tired and hungry, when Spode drew me aside.

  ‘I regret, Laurens,’ he said, ‘but I cannot go on. You must send me back to Europe. This life is too brutal – un peu trop brutale – for me.’

  ‘Of course you realize what a terrible hole this puts me in?’ I couldn’t help remarking.

  ‘Please! Please!’ he exclaimed at once, beco
ming deeply agitated. ‘Can’t you ever understand? Je n’ai pas de force . . . I cannot go on.’

  ‘All right, Eugene,’ I told him, realizing that the situation was beyond reasoning and persuasion, and wondering, as often before in the stillness of the night, what I could do to set it right for us. Spode might go, but I had to go on. Somehow, if I were not to break faith with the people who had trusted us and lose both them and myself thousands of pounds, I had to produce the film we had contracted to make. I would have to travel the odd thousand miles to the nearest railway, and from there search South Africa for someone to take Spode’s place. What was more, I would have to hurry, because neither Vyan nor Ben could stay on with me indefinitely. In all the weeks already on the way we had barely done any filming. We had not even found our main quarry. I realized, sick at heart, I would be more than lucky if I finished the film quite apart from carrying out my own personal mission. Now at the fag-end of that long day when the curtain of smoke came down on the journey into the swamp, failure, which had for so long been peering over my shoulder, seemed to stare me full in the face. For a start, the technical difficulties appeared insurmountable. Even supposing I found a cameraman to take on the work, Spode had been using the latest German film-cameras, and all the film had been wound on spools and in laboratories in Britain to fit these special cameras. My chances of finding someone with such a camera in South Africa seemed infinitesimal, but, unless I did, all the film would have to be re-wound painfully foot by foot, in some improvised darkness in the heat and dust and glare of a desert journey. Would that be possible? And even if it were, would I find a technician patient enough to endure it? The journey behind us was child’s play in comparison with what lay ahead. All this went through my mind in one brief moment as I faced the familiar tide of agitation in Spode and repeated: ‘All right, Eugene. I’ll go to Muhembo first thing in the morning and ask them to fly you out when next they have a plane for the mines. But I would be grateful if you’d leave your cameras behind. That would help a lot.’