The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  CHAPTER 9

  The Hunter at the Well

  I HAVE tried so far to keep only to an account of the strange sequence of events at the Slippery Hills and to suppress the need for interpreting them which assailed my mind whenever it was free of immediate duties. I have no intention of attempting to explain these events now except to mention one main fact of their consequences within myself.

  From the moment of burying the letter at the foot of the painting I had a feeling of having broken through one dimension of life that was full of accident and frustration, into a more positive one. The feeling not only persisted but daily gathered strength so that although my return journey to Johannesburg on this occasion was as difficult as the previous one, yet I felt rid of all anxiety and conflict. Good seemed to come even out of Charles’s tragedy.

  I took Charles with me in order that he might see his family and without him I might not have been able to deal with my film problem in time. There were no planes available at Maun, and the organization of Mines were not expecting one for days, so on the morning after our arrival we were compelled to set out across the four-hundred-mile strip of the Northern Kalahari between Maun and Francistown in a diesel truck. Halfway across the desert between the wide, white horns of the great Makarikari salt lake and miles from any drinking water, the truck broke down. The driver was unable to mend it, and had it not been for Charles, who went to work in his characteristic way, I do not know when, if ever, we would have arrived.

  The same good fortune protected me in Johannesburg. I found a remarkable old German, connoisseur of precision instruments, who promised to do the necessary spare part for Duncan’s camera within a week. He also told me of a rumour going round his specialized circle that a new camera of the same make had appeared in the city in the past week or so. By telephone, on foot, and in endless taxis, I set out on the trail of that camera like the master detective in a boy’s fiction story. In a few days I had tracked down the owner. He asked of me what, even today, seems an almost bloodthirsty fee. However, life for him had not been easy and my own need was desperate so I consented without even bargaining. Leaving Charles to wait for Duncan’s repaired camera and to follow at leisure, I caught the night train to Mafeking. There in the early evening Spencer Minchin, a lawyer and an old friend, took me on in his small plane. We spent the afternoon three hundred miles away at a D.C.’s court where Minchin had a client to defend; that night we flew further north, and early the next morning he flew me back into the Kalahari by way of Francistown, Bushman Pits, and Maun. There I was glad to hear that Vyan and Ben, in good heart, had moved on some days before with all four Land-Rovers in order to meet me, according to our pre-arranged plan, at Gemsbok Pan on the brink of the Central Desert. At Maun we stayed only long enough to refuel and took off into a sky so filled with the sulphur of summer and so bereft of life and substance of air that we cleared a notoriously difficult air-strip with little to spare. I had a brief glimpse of the copper water of the swamp, looked down on Lake Ngami swollen wider by the floods than it had been for a generation, and noticed that the Kalahari veld around it had already been burned brown and black by the sun. Some two hours later the plane, bucking like an unbroken horse over the wild waves of heat tearing over the sandveld, circled the small isolated administrative outpost of Gemsbok Pan. The sound of the engines brought my companions running out from beneath the trees of my old camping ground to man the Land-Rovers. They met me in an exhilarated mood at the landing-strip because they had not expected me for days. They themselves had arrived only the evening before, but already they had been busy.

  Ben, Vyan, and I have many friends among the older inhabitants of the small cattle-farming community which is scattered around the few permanent water-points of Ghanzis and Gemsbok Pan. On their way to Gemsbok Pan they had called in at one home after the other where they had been given a warm welcome. All the farms had ‘tame’ Bushmen, the descendants of pure aboriginal ancestors, working for them. Their number is always a variable quantity because, as I have indicated, even the Bushman born on these few remote European farms wearies from time to time of the iron tyranny of our minds and rediscovers the need for a long ‘walk-about’ in the vast desert around him. Only by protracted disappearances of such a kind at seasonal intervals does he find it possible to endure our wilful ways. The urge is greatest in the early summer when the rains break.

  Knowing the news would please me Ben now said with one of his rare smiles: ‘We’ve hit a perfect moment. You won’t find a Bushman inside the central desert now who hasn’t been born and bred there and knows where to sip the sands for water.’

  Also, aware of the little time left us, Ben had already persuaded one of the oldest pioneering households to part with one of their trusted Bushman servants to help us on the journey deep into the desert as tracker, interpreter, and adviser. He was a man of between fifty and sixty, born when the Europeans first burst into the Ghanzis area, and so had the past tradition of his people sufficiently near to him to mould his mind and imagination. Ben himself had known him all his life.

  When first I saw him standing diffidently by our camp fire I was startled. He might have been a younger brother of the little old men I had known. Despite half a century of fierce Kalahari sun his skin was the classical light yellow Bushman colour. He was little more than five feet high; his shoulders broad, hips narrow, behind firm, full, and clearly defined. His hands and feet were delicate and small; his eyes Mongolian and face incredibly lined, wrinkled, and sensitive; his ears neat and pointed. But there was not much laughter in his vivid eyes which, in repose, tended to look hurt and sometimes unreservedly bitter.

  When I greeted him and asked his name he answered softly as if even the right to possess a name of his own might be held against him: ‘I am Dabe, Master.’

  We were now at our final supply point, and had to load our Land-Rovers to full capacity before we could move safely into the waterless plains of sand and flame around us. It was dark before we had finished, but water and fuel tanks were full, our essential supplies replenished, and all four vehicles sunk deeply into their springs. We had to resign ourselves to starting early the following morning and spent the evening round the fire going over, for the last time, the best possible line of advance.

  Since time was shrinking fast, we could no longer contemplate the leisurely sweep around the central desert that I had originally intended. We had to make at once for the most likely area. Pooling our experience we concluded we could do not better than ‘have a stab’, as Vyan put it, direct at the heart of the desert contained between what must once have been the mighty water-courses of the Bhuitsivango and Okwa. Both were perennially dry, but I remembered clearly that one summer, just after the breaking of the rains, I had come across Bushman shelters in a bend of the remote Bhuitsivango. These shelters between high sandy banks had been newly abandoned and so well made that they suggested a permanent refuge in the lean, testing seasons of the desert. Moreover, Ben said that his memory was constantly pricked by a recollection of a small pure Bushman community grouped round some sip-wells which he and his father, on a reckless and almost disastrous traverse of the desert, had stumbled on in the same area. Although he had been only a young boy at the time he had never forgotten the track they had taken from Gemsbok Pan and had a feeling he could find his way back there.

  I had ample experience of how precise Ben’s imponderable feelings about the Kalahari could prove in practice. That, and his mention of sip-wells, decided me. We all were convinced that the sort of community we were seeking could only exist if in possession of some secret supply of permanent water. All the open permanent waters in the Kalahari had long since been stolen from the Bushman by the encroaching races, and the only sources left to him were those hidden securely under the deep sands of the central desert. The location of these sip-wells was a secret shared only with his own trusted kind and on all my journeys, over many years, I had never found one. I might, indeed, have dismissed the constant talk of s
ip-wells as fantastic if Ben had not vouched for their existence. Also, one of the old pioneers of Ghanzis had once described to me in detail how, when lost and dying of thirst, his life had been saved by a Bushman woman who had dragged him to some place where she had sucked water out of a hollow stick inserted in the hot sands, and squirted it directly from her mouth into his.

  ‘We’ll follow Ben’s hunch first,’ I decided at the end of the evening.

  There is no need now to go over the detail of the journey that followed deeper and deeper into the desert; the slow progress through the deep sand, and the monotonous task of breaking our way through scrub and bush under a direct and pitiless sun in a cloudless blue sky, with only Ben’s memory to bring us back to course, like a compass keeping a helmsman in safety on the high seas. What matters is that in the heat of a blinding day we met a small group of little people of mixed blood making their way out as fast as their parched and emaciated bodies could carry them to shelter at some frontier cattle-post. They confirmed that we were not very far from a group of true Bushman with access to secret water. With a reward of food and tobacco we did persuade one of them to come and put us on the right way, but it was clear from the start that he feared the commission. I was not surprised, therefore, when a barrier of impenetrable thorn halted us and forced us to reconnoitre on foot, that he abandoned us and vanished into the desert bush. However, we took it as a good sign that the direction in which he had set us conformed to the bearing magnetic in Ben’s memory. Finally, at about three on a baking afternoon, we got convincing confirmation. Dabe, who had run ahead to scout through a difficult bit of bush, suddenly called us to him. He pointed at a set of small human footprints in the sand. They could have been duplicates of those I had seen in clay at the foot of the great storm-tree years before. Once again, it seemed I heard the voice of the old ’Suto servant from my childhood saying clearly: ‘You have only to see his small footprint once never to forget it and to know it always from the spoor of other men.’

  I looked at Dabe whose eyes then were neither sad nor bitter.

  He anticipated the obvious question. ‘Wild Bushman, Master,’ he said. ‘Came by here this morning to walk so! . . .’ He pointed in the general direction we had followed all day.

  From there onwards we followed closely to the footprints. Mile by mile they became fresher. Hope rose fast in me like a tide in flood. Finally, towards evening we climbed out of the scrub and bush on to the crest of a high ridge of sand. We looked down on to the deep heart of the desert and the empty bed of a broad, winding old water-course far below. The sun was low behind us and already lining the water-course with shadow. A strange, hot wind blew in our faces. We climbed on to the roofs of our Land-Rovers and looked further into that remote world sealed with red sand, and spread out as still as the water of a locked ocean. It looked utterly empty, without smoke or even a spiral of dervish dust that dances daily more and more demoniacally before the terrible court the drought holds in its desert as the time for rain approaches. Yet there before us were the set of prints clearly leading down into the depression below.

  ‘The place I had in mind’, Ben said slowly, ‘was somewhere down there . . . I’m certain . . .’

  He was interrupted by Dabe, his voice blurred with emotion, exclaiming: ‘Oh, look! There’s a wild man down there.’

  ‘Down there’ was so far away that it took me some time to see a small black blob bobbing up and down in the shining waves of grass.

  I have often wondered since what would have happened if the wind had not been blowing away the sounds of our approach, and if the sun had not been turned to blind any eyes raised in our direction. By these means we were enabled to drop so quietly down the sandy slope that we were almost upon the Bushman before he knew we were through the secret portals of his castle of sand. Long before he saw us we were able to identify the bare head of a young Bushman working energetically at something in the grass. When he heard us, he shot upright like an arrow out of the grass and grabbed his spear, but already Dabe was calling out loudly the ancient Bushman greeting: ‘Good day. I saw you from afar and I am dying of hunger.’

  The young man stuck his spear in the sand and with his right hand raised, palm open and fingers up, walked shyly towards us, saying in a tone I had never heard before: ‘Good day! I have been dead but now that you have come, I live again.’

  We had made contact at last! I was so overwhelmed by the fact that for a moment I barely knew what to do. It was the young man, after the exchange of greetings in his own tongue, a drink of our best water, and a smoke of tobacco, who put us all at our ease with his command of natural manners.

  He was taller than Dabe but slighter, with fine bones and, of course, much younger. Nor was there any sign of bitterness or hurt in his eyes. His features were regular and sensitive in the classical Bushman model. His eyes were wide and large and looked steadily into mine when I asked him a question. They had the same vivid light in them which occasionally one sees in Europe on the faces of gypsies in Spain. He was naked, with a loin strap made of duiker skin around his middle, and his skin of a fresh apricot colour was still stained in places with the blood of an animal recently killed. All in all he had a wonderful wild beauty about him. Even his smell was astringent with the essences of untamed earth and wild animal-being. It was a smell as archaic and provocative in its way as the Mona Lisa’s smile is intense. But one of us, I forget which, at the first sharp whiff made a grimace of distaste. I rebuked him sharply, fearing the alert young Bushman would interpret it only too accurately.

  His name he told us was ‘Nxou’. It signified, according to Dabe, a ‘wooden bowl for food’. He and his people lived nearby, and he said that if we would give him time to finish what he had been doing he would show us a camping place near his home, and in the morning take us to his people. We watched him, probing holes in the sand with a pliable rod about twenty feet long and a sharp pointed hook at the end of it. The holes were made by spring-hares and soon he had hunted out his quarry and killed it deftly with a wooden club lying ready beside him. That done he collected his spear, a bow and quiver full of arrows, a leather shoulder-satchel containing some ostrich eggs filled with water, picked up his club and the dead hare, and declared himself ready.

  Any fears I had that he might decide to run from us in the dark were shamed by the air of trust with which he committed himself to us. We had no room in any of our Land-Rovers but he, who had never seen a motor before, unhesitatingly seated himself with his belongings on the spare-wheel on the bonnet of my vehicle and in this way, just as the luminous, pure twilight descended, he calmly brought us to a place where the bush was reforming its ranks beyond the frontier of grass favoured by the dunes and the wide depression. There, he said, we would have wood for fire by night and some shade in the day. Promising to return early in the morning he bade us a grave good night or, to translate literally from Bushman ‘Txhaiisai-xhum’, beseeched us to ‘rest well’. Then he walked away from us into the brown of evening, so supple in limb that I had only seen his equal in the wild dog whose inexhaustible capacity for movement carries him over land like a ripple across a pool.

  ‘Is it wise to let him go like that?’ Duncan asked, anxious for his film. ‘D’you really expect ever to see him again?’

  I had no hesitation in replying: ‘We’ll see him first thing in the morning.’

  No camping site in the central desert can ever be spectacular. This one was no exception and was, without doubt, the most uncomfortable we ever had. The trees in the dense thorn bush around were little more than ten feet high and gave little shade. We had to make our home under a nylon tarpaulin stretched between our Land-Rovers, and there in the long days to come we hoped to hold out against the Kalahari extremes of sun and weather. The site did not even offer the normal compensation of a generous view over the desert because there was a restricted ring of tough thorn trees and brief glades of red sand and grass about us. Yet we were more content than we had ever been. There one fel
t curiously close to the secret world into which we had broken, as if clasped in its arms and held close to its warm and deeply breathing bosom. We had made contact! It is impossible to exaggerate what that meant to us all who had been disappointed so often, and travelled so many thousands of vain, hot, uncomfortable miles. Ben, after his incredible feat of tracking by childhood memory, talked eloquently about his experiences of the desert and its animals and people. Vyan joined in as freely and disclosed how in vain he had tried to persuade his Government to use Bushmen as trackers against Mau-mau because he was convinced they were the best in the world. I was sad that Charles was not yet there to share the moment with us, but judged it appropriate to produce some of the ‘surprises’ I carry for unique occasions.

  With Jeremiah’s assistance I gave them a special dinner, printing this menu in block letters by the firelight:

  HOTEL KALAHARI

  PROPRIÉTAIRE: LE BON DIEU

  *

  CONSOMMÉ LYONNAIS (DE-HYDRATED)

  *

  BACON, SAFFRON RICE, AND RAISINS

  *

  PEACHES AND CREAM (BOTH TINNED)

  *

  COFFEE

  *

  CHEF: JEREMIAH MUWENDA

  MAÎTRE D’HÔTEL: JOHN RAOUTHAGALL

  Although tired, we talked until late in the night, Dabe and all our staunch African companions crowding around to listen. The only warning note came from me. Remembering the grimace made at Nxou’s smell I felt compelled to utter a warning. I begged them to remember in the days to come that we were there not to teach the Bushman but solely to learn all we could from him, his ways, his spirit, and the terms he had made with his own life in a world so harsh that even the greediest among us had shunned it. We could do that only if we set aside our own bias and preferences, and prepared ourselves to listen and observe. Also we would have to tread delicately so as not to inflict vital injury on the Bushman’s natural values.