The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  I tried to console myself with the facile optimism of the guilty hoping that the shots might have missed, and said nothing for the moment. We caught up with the advance guard some miles further on in a place where bush and plain had been burnt out by some hunter in preparation for the summer’s rain. For miles around it was black and scorched as if a tongue of the fire which consumed Sodom and Gomorrah had licked it bare.

  John and Jeremiah were close by the Land-Rover disembowelling a wart-hog. Vyan coming from afar towards us was followed by Cheruyiot with a steenbuck across his shoulders. The expression on Samutchoso’s face was almost more than I could bear.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said at once. ‘It’s all my fault, not theirs. I forgot to tell them. I had so much trouble I forgot my promise.’

  His face relaxed and he said that he understood, but the implication was that it was not for him either to understand or absolve. With that and a brief, belated explanation and warning to my hunter companions that nothing under any conditions was to be shot, I had to be content.

  From there we pushed on faster because the passage over the blackened plain was easy. By eleven o’clock the highest of the hills rose above the blue of distance, and between us and them lay a bush of shimmering peacock leaves. After so many weeks in flat land and level swamp the sudden lift of the remote hills produced an immediate emotion and one experienced forthwith that urge to devotion which once made hills and mountains sacred to man who then believed that wherever the earth soared upwards to meet the sky one was in the presence of an act of the spirit as much as a feature of geology. I thought of the psalmist’s ‘I will uplift my eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help,’ and marvelled that the same instinct had conducted Samutchoso to the hills to pray.

  The nearer we came the stronger this impression grew, and as the hills rose at last clear above the bush they seemed to communicate their own atmosphere to us all. The highest could not have been more than a thousand feet. But they rose sheer out of the flat plain and were from the base up made entirely of stone, and this alone, in a world of deep sand, gave them a sense of mystery. The others, too, felt it. We stopped, and Charles and I climbed on to the roof of my Land-Rover to observe them through field glasses. Jeremiah, who knew nothing of Samutchoso’s story, stared hard at the hills. He had been for a short while to a mission school in Barotseland and now he said suddenly in a small voice: ‘Master, they look like the rocks Moses struck in the desert to let out water for the Israelites!’

  The rock on the highest of the hills certainly was imposing. Blue and shining like tempered steel, it covered the steep flanks in smooth slabs often a hundred feet or more high. On one of the highest faces there appeared to be rust-red markings of a curiously hieroglyphic design. Charles, for one moment, thought they were ancient Egyptian silhouettes painted on the rock, and my own heart beat faster for I had nursed a hope that here might be some isolated and secure place in the sandy desert with sufficient rock to enable the Bushman to practise his age-old art of painting. But long scrutiny through glasses disillusioned us both. The markings were of the terrible extremes of weather and time.

  After that we studied the hills for signs of smoke but not a wisp was to be seen. We consoled ourselves with the thought that it was not the hour for smoke. Also, according to Samutchoso, the Bushmen camped in the hidden bush at the centre of the horse-shoe swing of the hills. Slowly we moved closer, the sand getting deeper, the bush more dense, and the blue hills higher. There was no wind, not even a heat whorl to contort the terrible calm of the day on the face of the hills. The bushes in the crevices between the stony slabs looked more like objects petrified in stone than pliable leaves and branches. Nor was there a sound to be heard. At any moment I expected the inevitable baboon to challenge us, but it never did. I searched the blueblack sky arched over us like the span of a bridge drumming with the urgent traffic of darkness massing beyond the sun. But both it and the blue water below the arch were empty of the hawk, buzzard, and vulture that normally man the lofty foretop of the desert day. Indeed, it was as if everything that might have distracted our senses from the Slippery Hills deliberately had been cancelled from the scene. The hills were in sole command and so dominated our impressions that the two Land-Rovers, their behinds wiggling and waggling over the rough roadless plain as they searched for camping site and water, seemed like puppies fawning towards the feet of a stern master.

  When we caught up again with the advance Land-Rovers some hours later the vehicles were halted deep in the bush on the far side of the hills. The doors of both were flung wide open as if hastily abandoned. Ben, Vyan, Cheruyiot, and John had all disappeared. The heat was overwhelming because the vast slabs of rock fired in the noon-day sun added a gratuitous quota of degrees to the temperature. The silence was deeper than ever, and I was aware only of the sun flame hissing like a brood of yellow cobras in my ears. I thought of calling aloud to Vyan and Ben, but one look at the silent world of rocks and the tawny fringe of burning bush on the horseshoe crest above, forbade me. Any violence of sound I feared could be dangerously resented. I did not want to risk worsening our situation for already, in the crescent of the sullen rock, I felt rather like a mouse between the paws of a great cat.

  I went and joined Samutchoso and the others underneath the tattered shade of a tree and said in a whisper, ‘No good fussing. The bush is thick here. I expect they’ve gone on foot to reconnoitre and will be back soon.’

  As I said it I had an idea Samutchoso did not take their absence so lightly. However, I put it down to guilty conscience over my broken promise and tried to think no more of it.

  An hour later the others broke out of the bush almost on top of us. We had had no warning of their coming for the air was so thin and stricken with heat that it had not life enough to carry sound. They were all four exhausted, eager to join us under our tree, and to impart their news. They had seen no smoke and no traces of Bushman old or new. They had found a good level place for a camp under trees that threw real shade, near a deep cut in overhanging rock where water still oozed through.

  ‘It’s lovely pure water,’ Ben said. ‘But, my word it’s plagued with bees! Never seen so many wild bees in my life! We had difficulty in getting a drink without being stung.’

  The sun was setting by the time we had made camp, collected wood for our fires, and installed ourselves for a stay of several days. Still no sound or movement came from bush or hills. Even a stir of evening air would have been welcome to ease the immovable and shining heat hanging in the horseshoe bowl of rocks. Just before dark I took my gun and walked alone to the narrow gap between the highest of the hills in the hope that there I might meet some cooling air. But it was just as bad there so I started back at a quickened pace because the light was fast beginning to fail, and the silent raised rock faces made me feel acutely uncomfortable. In that red afterglow of an immense Kalahari sunset they had a strange, living personality as if their life had been only temporarily suspended in the sleep of motion that we call ‘matter’, and they might wake up, at any moment step down, and walk the desert on some cataclysmic occasion of their own.

  At this point I was deeply startled by a sound coming from the rocks on my right. I swung round, my gun ready, and the hair slowly creeping at the back of my neck. A superb kudu bull with an immense spread of curved Viking horn above his long pointed face, was making his way from ledge to ledge down a crimson cleft in the rocks. He moved with utter confidence, free of fear or hurry, passed close by me without a sideways glance, and made straight for the gap in the hills. Perhaps, I thought, he is one of the master spirits of which Samutchoso had spoken, who, now that night has come, is going from his dwelling in the rocks to do business among creatures in the world beyond? He vanished thus, leaving me to return to camp more subdued than ever.

  It is significant that none of us was at ease during all that first night in the hills. At first light the camp came alive as though glad to be rid of such darkness, and everyone, without urgin
g from me, began preparing vigorously for the day. Just before sunrise, however, we had an abrupt and odd interruption. Suddenly we were attacked by bees. From all directions, through the trees, they came winging sonorously at this unfamiliar hour. I have never witnessed anything like it. They came to sting, not in angry militant swarms but in great, shapeless dark-brown hordes, humming an esoteric tune of exhortation, crawling all over us and our belongings as if to sweep us, by sheer weight of numbers and volume of sound, out of their way. The smell and taste of our water could not have attracted them because they ignored it, as also the sugar set out for our breakfast coffee. They seemed interested only in beating their wings against our faces, crawling up our sleeves and trousers, and from time to time driving the mysterious point of their visitation home with a perfectly timed sting in the most tender spots.

  Perturbed by the thought of the retaliation the bees might provoke, I warned the camp: ‘Don’t kill any of them whatever else you do.’

  If I had hoped to please Samutchoso by my admonition it proved vain because his expression clearly implied that the warning would have served us better had it been delivered two days earlier. Everyone except myself was stung several times, and the camp was made to look foolish and ridiculously disordered by the evasive action, the involuntary jerks, sudden spasms, jumps, cries of protest, and all other unnatural efforts at self-control upon which I insisted. Then the moment the first shaft of wild sunlight struck at the camp through the purple gap in the hills, without sip of water or taste of sugar to sweeten their throats which must have been well-night hoarse with chanting, the bees withdrew suddenly as if on a signal from central command. Ben had been stung the most badly. He, too, had been the most sceptical of Samutchoso’s story and the dictate against killing when we discussed it the night before round the fire, but I didn’t carry that thought far. We ate our breakfast in unusual silence, with unexpectedly chastened expressions. However, hot food, coffee, and tobacco soon restored the spirits of my companions and they followed me out of camp to start the day’s work with a will.

  Our plan was, first, to examine the places at the base of the hills where Samutchoso knew Bushmen occasionally gathered. We walked in extended single-file because the bush of wide-spreading, bone-white acacia thorn was as tangled and plaited as it was dense. However Samutchoso, who led the way, soon found an easier game track which at intervals opened out on small clearings from which the rock faces were visible stark, bold and forbidding. The night did not appear to have improved the mood of the hills and I was not surprised when the bush itself came suddenly to a shuddering halt, leaving a clear space between itself and the base of the central hill as if centuries before it had learnt the importance of keeping a respectful distance from such reserved and imperious beings. Beneath the hills the shadows were cool and heavy, but, far above, the ragged, jagged shark’s tooth edges of the purple crags were lined with warm sunlight. However, below the bright hem of that still morning one saw other cuts, wounds, and scars in the steep surfaces that from a distance looked so impervious. There was hardly a face that was not torn, pock-marked, pitted, and wrinkled as if with incredible suffering and struggling. Everywhere great fragments had broken away to lie in massive splinters in the sand at the base, or to balance precariously on the edge of an abyss. Now one understood better the stern mood of the place, because one was looking on an entire world of rock, isolated and without allies of any kind, making a heroic-stand against disintegration by terrible forces of sand, sun, and time. It was an awesome spectacle, because neither the rock nor the forces deployed against it would give or accept quarter. As I was looking sombrely into those stony faces I heard an almost reproachful exclamation from Samutchoso at my side: ‘Master, but do you not see?’

  Both his voice and pointing finger were trembling with emotion. Over the scorched leaves of the tops of the bush conforming to a contour nearby, and about a hundred feet up, was a ledge of honey-coloured stone grafted into the blue iron rock. Above the ledge rose a smooth surface of the same warm, soft stone curved like a sea-shell as if rising into the blue to form a perfect dome. But it curved upwards thus for only about twenty feet and then was suddenly broken. I had no doubt I was looking at the wall and part of the ceiling of what had once been a great cave in the hills, safe above the night-prowl of the bush, and with an immense view into the activities of the flat Kalahari beyond. Some yellow stone from the dome of the cave was tipped precariously on the edges of the ledge, other fragments were toppled into the red sand at the base. But what held my attention still with the shock of discovery was the painting that looked down at us from the centre of what was left of the wall and dome of the cave. Heavy as were the shadows, and seeing it only darkly against the sharp morning light, it was yet so distinct and filled with fire of its own colour that every detail stood out with a burning clarity. In the focus of the painting, scarlet against the gold of the stone, was an enormous eland bull standing sideways, his massive body charged with masculine power and his noble head looking as if he had only that moment been disturbed in his grazing. He was painted as only a Bushman, who had a deep identification with the eland, could have painted him. Moreover, it seemed that he had been painted at a period before the Bushman’s serenity was threatened, for the look of calm and trustful inquiry on the eland’s face was complete. I was greatly moved because it seemed to me that this was the look with which not only the eland but the whole of the life of Africa must have regarded us when first we landed there. On the left of the bull, also deep in scarlet, was a tall female giraffe with an elegant Modigliani neck. With the tenderness of a solicitous mother she was looking past the eland towards a baby giraffe standing shyly in the right of the picture. In the same right-hand corner of the canvas below them the artist had signed this painting on the high wall with a firm impress of the palms of both hands, fingers extended and upright. The signature was marked so gaily and spontaneously that it brought an instant smile to my face. It looked so young and fresh that it mocked my recollection that rock-paintings signed in this manner are among the oldest in the world.

  ‘How old is it, Samutchoso?’ I asked.

  ‘I do not know, Master,’ he replied. ‘I only know it was like this when my grandfather found it as a boy, and from what he told me and what I have seen myself it never gets older.’

  ‘You mean the colours do not fade?’

  ‘No! The colours do not fade, Master,’ he answered, and would, I think, have said more if our party, one by one, had not been forming round us. They, too, fell silent when they saw the painting of the bull and his two companions standing there so serenely in that quiet viaduct of time.

  Duncan was the first to break the silence with an excited command to Cheruyiot: ‘Jambo, my tripod, quick!’

  He set up his camera, trained a telescopic lens on the painting, and began filming. The film ran for only a few seconds when the precise whirr of the mechanism became blurred and the camera suddenly stopped.

  ‘That’s odd,’ Duncan said, examining it, ‘the magazine’s jammed and yet it’s brand new.’

  Samutchoso looked from him to me with the same expression I had observed on his face during the invasion of the bees in our camp, but said nothing. Duncan loaded the camera with another magazine and began filming again. A few seconds later exactly the same stoppage occurred.

  ‘This is most extraordinary!’ he exclaimed, beginning to look disconcerted. ‘All the time I’ve been with you I’ve had no trouble of this kind and now two jams in as many minutes. It’s unbelievable. But never mind! Third time lucky!’ He started the third and only spare magazine. In the same number of brief seconds the third magazine jammed.

  ‘This is fantastic,’ he cried, now thoroughly upset. ‘In all the years I’ve filmed this has never happened before. I’m afraid I’ll have to go back to the camp, clear these magazines, and fetch the remaining spares before I can go on.’

  While he and Cheruyiot returned to camp, we closed in on the base of the rocks that now
seemed to stare back at us in the swelling light and heat of day with a glimmer of grim satisfaction, and started to follow the rocky contour on the ground. Soon we found other fragments of painting. Indeed, where there was rock smooth enough for the purpose there were inevitably traces of painting. On the whole they were not as vivid and clear as the great raised piece, perhaps because they were even older. The rock surfaces themselves had been destroyed by weather and time. The subjects were almost entirely animal, many of them of animals which, like the charging rhinoceros, no longer existed in that part of the world, and belonged to the earliest period of Bushman painting when, like the fabulous world of Aesop, the artist’s vision of himself and his nature were still utterly contained in the glittering mirror of animal life before him. In one deep bay in the cliffs we came across what must have been the master of masterpieces among the Slippery Hills. The rock rose smooth and sheer out of the sand, and for a distance of about forty feet, and twelve feet high, it was painted with a crowded scene of the animal world. Most of this immense frieze was faded, torn, or semi-obliterated, but there was enough clear detail left to charge one’s blood with excitement at the stature of the original conception and the complicated achievement of the artist. The presence in one corner of a tall, elongated man suggested that the art was later than the others. But how could one tell? I only know that from that morning I have been pursued by a vision of those hills as a great fortress of once living Bushman culture, a Louvre of the desert filled with treasure. I would have given a great deal to have seen those sullen, hurt, rock faces in their original well-loved state, redeemed and glowing with ardent colour under a far blue Kalahari heaven, while daily the golden hunters came home to them from the plain, laden with game, to sit securely round their fires, eating meat and honey, washing down a draught of mead with the rare water filtered through the crevices, and perhaps discussing the latest picture hung in their absence in the contemporary wing of the gallery of time towering behind them.