The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  Now the place where we killed the eland was about fifty miles from the sip-wells. The trail had twisted and turned so much that I had no idea where we were or in which direction our camp lay. But Nxou and his companions had no doubt. That was another of the many impressive things about them. They were always centred. They knew, without conscious effort, where their home was, as we had seen proved on many other more baffling occasions. Once indeed, more than a hundred and fifty miles from home, when asked where it lay they had instantly turned and pointed out the direction. I had taken a compass bearing of our course and checked it. Nxou’s pointing arm might have been the magnetic needle of the instrument itself so truly did it register. So now, turning for home I only had to consult Nxou and follow his directions.

  But this was not yet the end of a wonderful day. Something very remarkable happened on the way back. We drove home slowly for the going was rough and our Land-Rovers deeply loaded with meat. The sun was down and the sky before us so red that Ben exclaimed in Afrikaans: ‘Dear Lord isn’t that a perfect sunset to end a hunter’s day? It looks really as if the Master Hunter up there, die ou Baas Jagter daar bo, has just killed his eland too.’

  Struck by this glimpse of the poet in Ben which was rarely exposed I was about to answer when he went on: ‘You know I once saw a little Bushman imprisoned in one of our gaols because he killed a giant bustard which according to the police, was a crime, since the bird was royal game and protected. He was dying because he couldn’t bear being shut up and having his freedom of movement stopped. When asked why he was ill he could only say that he missed seeing the sun set over the Kalahari. Physically the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with him but he died none the less!’

  We were silent for a while, and then, trying to break out of the gloom, I said: ‘I wonder what they’ll say at the sip-wells when they learn that we’ve killed an eland?’

  ‘Excuse me, Master,’ Dabe said, bolder than I had ever known him, ‘they already know.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘They know by wire,’ he declared, the English word ‘wire’ on his Bushman tongue making me start with its unexpectedness.

  ‘Wire?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Yes. A wire, Master. I have seen my own master go many times to the D.C. at Gemsbok Pan and get him to send a wire to the buyers telling them when he is going to trek out to them with his cattle. We Bushmen have a wire here’ – he tapped his chest – ‘that brings us news.’

  More than that I couldn’t get out of him, but even before we were home it was clear that our sceptical minds were about to be humbled. From afar in the dark, long before our fires were visible from a place where we stopped to adjust our heavy load, the black silence was broken by a glitter of new song from the women.

  ‘Do you hear that, oh, my Master?’ Dabe said, whistling between his teeth. ‘Do you hear? They’re singing the Eland Song.’

  Whether by ‘wire’, or by what mysterious means, they did know at the sip-wells and were preparing to give their hunters the greatest of welcomes. By that time we ourselves were so identified in deed as well as mind with our hosts that, despite the vast differences of upbringing and culture, their exalted mood also became our own.

  Accordingly I woke up the next morning with a feeling of profound achievement. Jeremiah, John, Cheruyiot, as they set about cutting up the fat of the great eland brisket to sweeten our hard fare, seemed to be purring with satisfaction. My European companions emerged from their sleep in similar mood, and I’d never seen a camp happier than we were that morning and prepared for the dance that was to come. ‘The first ball of the season’ as Duncan called it.

  Apart from this it was also one of those Kalahari days which seemed to be charged with a meaning of its own. I felt as if it had been shaped by some master designer to carry forward into a new dimension the pattern that had been achieved on the previous evening.

  Hitherto, in the rush of recording human events, I have neglected to tell of the unfolding of the seasons which accompanied them. All the time at the sip-wells it had been growing steadily and frighteningly hotter. The sun had long ceased to be a friend, and the scorched earth which had daily shrunk back into its last reserve of shade had steadily darkened until at noon-day the leaves of the gallant thorn trees looked as if they were about to crumble to ashes, and greeted the sunset with a sigh of relief that was echoed in our own exhausted senses. Often at noon I would see Nxou and his companions throw themselves down beside us in shade that was little more than a paler form of sunlight and instantly go to sleep, more weary with heat than with distances run. This was perhaps the most moving of all their gestures, this instant act of trust between them and the harsh desert earth which, though too harsh for us, had been kinder to them in its pagan heart than we had ever been. They lay there, securely clasped to the earth and nourished with sleep at its unfailing bosom. But when they woke they instantly stood up to scan the sky for cloud and other signs of rain as if even in their deep sleep they had felt the Mother Earth exclaim: ‘Dear God, will such dryness never end?’

  Daily too, on our far-hunting round, we noticed that the surface of the desert became more churned and pitted where buck and other animals had dug, with hoof and claw, to get at the roots and tubers which could give them the relief of moisture that the heavens increasingly denied. No European can know how deep this need and anxiety of the waste-land of Africa enters into the blood and mind of its children. Here at the sipwells it was no laughing matter. Nxou and his people did not fear for their store of water supply, which was deep in the sand and protected against the sun. But they feared what the lack of rain would do to the grasses and the game on which they lived. They alone knew what kind of disaster could come if the rains failed. I am certain many a Bushman community has perished from drought and famine in the Kalahari unknown to anyone, with only a vortex of vultures in the blue to mark the place of their going, and only the hyaena and jackal to sing their funeral song. Daily the shadow of this deep fear lengthened in our awareness as sun after sun went down without a cloud in the sky; and night upon night came and went without the hopegiving flicker of lightning below the star-uneasy horizon.

  One night round the fire, all of us obsessed with this discharge of disquiet in our blood, Ben told us something which perhaps shows how deeply contained is the natural Bushman in the rhythms of the seasons, and how much he is a part of their great plans. Ben told us that the little man’s womenfolk would become sterile during periods of drought and, until the rains broke, would cease to conceive. He knew this from his own experience and from that of great hunters before him. That was one reason why the Bushman had such small families. Had we not noticed, he asked, that there were no pregnant women around? Where else in Africa would we see so many married and vigorous young women and not one in the family way? Yet this fear of drought went even deeper than that. If a woman had conceived in a fall of rain that was not maintained and bore a child in a period of drought which threatened the survival of all, immediately at birth the child was taken from her, before, as Dabe confirmed, ‘it could cry in her heart’, and was killed by the other women. The anguish and bitterness with which those who loved children performed this deed, Ben said, proved how necessary it was. Also he thought it would silence those who condemned them from their armchairs of plush and plenty. We went to bed with a new dimension added to our view of the dark necessities among which this rare flame of Stone Age life burned.

  But on this particular morning there was a first real promise of rain in the air. The atmosphere was silver-dim with sudden moisture and heavy with electricity and heat. Soon after breakfast a cloud no larger than the Old Testament’s hand of man appeared with a flag of wind at its head. It was soon followed by others, and all morning long we watched with growing excitement cloud upon cumulus cloud piling up like towers and palaces over some enchanted Tempest island. Were we to be privileged to celebrate the hunter’s fulfilment not only with meat that was the food of his gods,
but also with the water that was wine to his earth? As the day wore on the answer seemed likely to be positive. Yet even so I, who had seen so many promises of rain snatched away at the last moment from the cracked lips of the African earth, was afraid to hope until, at long last, the thunder began to mutter on a darkening horizon. By the time the first dancers started coming into our camp the rumble of thunder was constant and rolling slowly nearer like noise of a great battle. Suddenly it made our small camp look puny and exposed. Yet it added to the jubilation of the dancers in the clearing we had made for them.

  How lovely they looked! The women had rubbed some fat into their skins and their bodies were a-glitter. Their jewellery, too, seemed to have been polished and flashed in the sun which moved on, undismayed, to grapple with the giant cloud rising in the west. The women walked towards us already attuned to the music, humming, quivering, and swaying with its rhythm and song. As they arrived they quickly collected on the edge of the clearing and began singing aloud, beating time with their feet and hands. Occasionally one of the older women would run out into the open, her arms stetched wide like the wings of a bird, her mincing steps and jeering song mocking the men who had not yet appeared from the bush, for their tardiness.

  The men, however, held back out of sight, obedient to their own part in the overall pattern of the dance to come. They seemed, deliberately, to provoke the women to a greater and greater frenzy of singing and longing. When at last they came it was because they could no longer keep away and were compelled almost against their will. Then a moan as of great pain broke from them. Arms stretched out, feet ceaselessly pounding and re-pounding the earth, they came bounding out of the bush with that cry of theirs: ‘Oh, look, like birds we come!’

  When this happened the triumph in the women’s voices soared like a star in the night and brought about a new intensity of passion to their singing. The men became so drawn into the mood of the music that it was nearly impossible to recognize their individuality. An archaic mask sat on all faces as they began to sing and dance the theme of the Eland. I have seen many primitive dances. They are invariably communal affairs and tend to have a bold, often violent, and fairly obvious pattern. But this music was rich, varied, tender, and filled with unworldly longing. It had a curious weave and rhythm to it, some deep-river movement of life, turning and twisting, swirling and eddying back upon itself in order to round some invisible objects in its profound bed as it swept on to the sea.

  In this manner they danced their way into the life of their beloved eland and their mystical participation in his being. They danced him in the herd, his cows, heifers, and children around him. They danced him in his courting right up to the moment where, fastidious animal that he is, he vanishes alone, with his woman, for his love-making in the bush. They danced him grown old, challenged, and about to be displaced by the young bulls in the herd. Quite naturally the older men became the challenged, the younger the challengers. The movements of the dancers, the expression on their faces, and the voices crying ‘Oh!’ from far down in their throats and straight from the source where the first man had his being, greatly moved us. We saw the lust for battle in the young faces; the look of perplexity in the eyes of the women torn between loyalty to a former lord and obedience to the urge of new life within them, we saw the agony of impending defeat in the expression of the old bulls. And we saw life decide the battle; the old cast out from the herd while the young, with unbelievable tenderness, put an arm around the shoulders of a woman become suddenly still with the acceptance of her fate, and so move inexorably together towards the oncoming night.

  The darkness fell quickly because of the rising storm, and the dance of the Eland naturally made way for the greatest of all the Bushman dances: The Fire Dance. Here the women, without a pause, grouped themselves singing in the centre of the clearing. Quickly they piled a fire there, lit it the classical way, and then an uncle of Nxou’s led the men in a ring dancing around the fire. They danced the first Bushman soul setting out in the darkness, before mind or matter, to look for substance for fire. They looked in vain for its spoor in the sand as if fire were some subtle animal. Hour after hour they went round and round in the same circle without finding it. They called on the sun, moon, and stars to give them fire. Then we saw them leading the blind companions who, in some prehistoric period of the quest, had gone too near the scorching flames. Because it was a sacred dance we noticed how in the progress of his search the seeker now acquired the power of healing. Suddenly he would break off his dancing to stand behind a moaning woman and, with trembling hands draw out of her the spirit that was causing her unrest, emitting in the process the cry of the animal with which the alien invader was identified. That done, he would return to join the magic circle still dancing in search of fire. How the dancers found the power to go on ever faster and faster, hour after hour, seemed beyond explanation or belief. They danced so hard and long that the circle in the sand became a groove, then the groove a ditch high up to their calves. Long before the end they seemed to pass over into a dimension of reality far out of reach of my understanding, and to a moment and a place which belonged only technically to the desert in which we were all gathered. Indeed, so obsessed did the men become by this search for fire that they were drawn nearer and nearer to the flames beside which the woman sat. Then, suddenly, they halved the circle and went dancing with their bare feet through the middle of the flames. But even that was not the end of the quest. Now, the longing became so intense that two of the older women were kept constantly busy preventing some fire-obsessed man from breaking out of the circle and hurling himself head first straight into the flames, like a moth overcome by excess of longing for the light. Indeed one man did break through, and before he could be stopped had scooped up a handful of burning coals and attempted to swallow them whole.

  All the while, in the ebb of the music rising and falling like a tide around us, the noise of the thunder rose louder in our ears. The lightning began to play incessantly overhead and to wash the dancers yellow in a Nibelungen gold. It sounded as if the whole of nature was being mobilized to participate in this expression of man’s first and still unfulfilled quest. The jackals, hyaenas, the shriek owls, the male ostriches booming, all seemed stirred to howl and scream as never before, and beyond the sipwells the lions roared back deeply and most strangely at them, at us, and at the storm. Towards the end the men’s feet together were beating the earth so fast and regularly that it was difficult to believe that the noise was made by the feet of many men and not by a single automatic piston.

  At last, here and there, a dancer began to fall in his tracks. The two older women would pick him up and carry him aside where he lay moaning in a trance of fatigue in the darkness. Then, almost on the second of midnight, the hero of the dance, Nxou’s slender and comely uncle, suddenly found fire the way it was meant to be found. He knelt down reverently beside it, the singing died away in one last sob of utter exhaustion, the dancers sank to the earth while the man picked up the coals in his naked hands and arose to scatter them far and wide for all the world to share. He stood there swaying on his feet, the sweat of an unimaginable exertion like silk tight upon his skin, dazed with the anguish of near-disaster in doom of eternal darkness as well as by the climax of deliverance. Swaying, he made a gesture and uttered words of prayer to the night around him. What the words were I never knew, except that Dabe said they were too ancient for him to understand. All I do know is that I myself felt very near the presence of a god and my eyes seemed blinded as if by sudden revelation. In the darkness beyond the sip-wells, on the high dunes at the back of the heroic dancer, the lightning struck with a savage, kriss-like cut at the trembling earth, so near that the crackle of its fire and the explosion of the thunder sounded simultaneously in my ear. And at that moment the rain fell.

  It rained all night. I thought I had never heard a sweeter sound than it made on the tarpaulin over my head and in the sand within reach of my hand. So close had my search in the past few weeks broug
ht me to the earth, its elements, and its natural children that throughout the rest of the eventful night in my half-waking condition I felt I had re-discovered the first language of all things and could hear plainly the deep murmur of the earth taking the rain into her like a woman taking a lover into her arms, all the more ardently because secretly she had doubted that he would ever come. I went on lying there in the darkness as if in the presence of Gods and Titans. All around me the voice of the thunder, now deafening with nearness, now solemn with distance, was like the voice Moses heard on his mountain-top in the desert of Sinai. When the dawn broke it was still raining heavily, and already there was a bloom of quickening new life in leaf, grass, and mark.

  For once Nxou did not come to me at dawn. He appeared with Bauxhau about noon, both running and laughing with joy at their pretended dismay at the cold impact of the rain on their warm, naked skins. We took them into our shelter and there, over mugs of hot coffee, it happened. Suddenly with the two of them I had the same feeling that I had had with the earth and rain in the previous night. For the first time since I had met them we had access to the same language of meaning.

  On the impulse I asked: ‘Nxou, who was the first Bushman in the world?’

  The old look of reserve flickered for a second over his fine-drawn face. Then his eyes cleared and he said: ‘If someone told me his name was Oeng-oeng, I would not know how to say “no”.’

  ‘So the first Bushman was called Oeng-oeng?’ I quickly followed up.

  ‘Yes! Oh, yes! Yes!’ he answered, his eyes shining as if he was even more pleased than I that at last the barrier was down. ‘His name was Oeng-oeng.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Bauxhau grinning, ‘he was Oeng-oeng.’

  Then it all poured out. We sat there for the rest of the day listening to their stories. Charles, who had come back with Ben and Vyan some days before after they had gone out to one of our supply points to re-fuel and re-provision, happier than ever to be with us, moved quietly in the background to record all they told us. In the days that followed, whenever we had leisure from hunting or filming the process went on, from the first version of creation and Nxou’s Shakespearian assertion that there was ‘a dream dreaming us,’ to the last tangled and tortured expression of spirit when his forefathers were brutally torn from the main trunk of their race and flung far out into the desert. Happy, at last, to be able to share with us what was also most precious to them, they poured out all before us. I would have loved to question and elucidate but I was afraid, unwittingly, to intrude and cause damage. Already with our radio-active intellects we had hurt so deeply the first spirit of Africa. So I just listened, entranced.