by Wilbur Smith
Then the hanging clouds burst open and the rain fell from them thick as locusts. Each drop as it struck the surface of the pan rolled into a globule of mud, or made the wiry scrub branches around the edge jump and quiver as though flocks of invisible birds had alighted upon them.
The rain stung Centaine’s skin, and one drop struck her in the eye and blinded her for a second. She blinked it clear and laughed to see O’wa and H’ani capering across the pan. They had thrown aside their meagre clothing and they danced naked in the rain. Each drop burst in a silver puff upon their wrinkled amber skin and they howled delightedly at the pricks of it.
Centaine ripped off her own canvas skirt, threw aside the shawl, and mother-naked stood with her arms thrown open and her face turned to the clouds. The rain thrashed her, and melted her long dark hair down across her face and shoulders. She pushed it aside with both hands and opened her mouth wide.
It was as though she stood under a waterfall. The rain poured into her mouth as fast as she could swallow. The far edge of the pan disappeared behind the blue veils of falling rain, and the surface turned to yellow mud.
The rain was so cold that a rash of goose bumps ran down Centaine’s forearms and her nipples darkened and hardened, but she laughed with joy and ran out to the pan to dance with the San, and the thunder sounded as though massive boulders were rolling across the roof of the sky.
The earth seemed to dissolve under the solid sheets of silver water. The pan was ankle-deep and the silky mud squelched up between Centaine’s toes. The rain gave them new life and strength and they danced and sang until O’wa stopped abruptly and cocked his head to listen.
Centaine could hear nothing above the thunder and the lash of the rain, but O’wa shouted a warning. They floundered to the steep bank of the pan, slipping in the glutinous mud and the yellow waters which by now reached to their knees. From the bank Centaine heard the sound which had alarmed O’wa, a low rushing like a high wind in tall trees.
‘The river,’ O’wa pointed through the thick palisade of silver rain, ‘the river is alive again.’
It came like a living thing, a monstrous frothing yellow python down the sandy river bed, and it hissed from bank to bank, carrying the bodies of drowned animals and the branches of trees in its flood. It burst into the flooded pan and raced in serried waves across the surface, breaking on the bank beneath their feet, swirling on to catch them around the legs and threatening to drag them under.
They snatched up their few possessions and waded to higher ground, clinging to each other for support. The rain clouds brought on premature night, and it was cold. There was no chance of a fire and they huddled together for warmth and shivered miserably.
The rain fell without slackening all that night.
In the dull leaden dawn they looked across a drowned landscape, a vast shimmering lake with islands of higher ground from which the water streamed, and stranded acacia trees like the backs of whales.
‘Will it never stop?’ Centaine whispered. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably, and the chill seemed to have to reached into her womb, for the infant writhed and kicked in protest.
‘Please let it stop now.’ The San suffered the cold with the fortitude they showed for all hardship. Rather than slackening, the rain seemed to increase in tempo, and hid the sorry drowned land from them behind a glassy curtain.
Then the rain stopped. There was no warning, no faltering or tapering off; one second it was falling in a solid cascade and the next it was over. The ceiling of low bruised cloud split open and peeled away like the skin from a ripe fruit, revealing the clean washed blue of the sky, and the sun burst upon them with blinding brilliance, once more stunning Centaine with the sudden contrasts of this wild continent.
Before noon, the thirsty earth had drunk down the waters that had fallen upon it. The floods sank away without trace. Only in the pan itself surface water still lay glittering sulphurous-yellow from bank to far bank. However, the land was cleansed and vivid with colour. The dust that had coated each bush and tree was washed away and Centaine saw greens that she had never dreamed this tan, lion-coloured land could contain. The earth, still damp, was rich with ochres and oranges and reds and the songs of the little desert larks were joyous.
They laid out their scant possessions in the sun and they steamed as they dried. O’wa could not contain himself and he danced ecstatically.
‘The cloud spirits have opened the road for us. They have replenished the water-holes to the east. Make ready, H’ani, my little flower of the desert: before the dawn tomorrow we will march.’
Within the first day’s march they entered a new country, so different that Centaine could scarcely believe it was on the same continent. Here the ancient dunes had compacted and consolidated into gentle undulations, and they now supported abundant plant life.
Stands of mopani and tall kiaat, alternating with almost impenetrable thickets of paper-bark, stood tall along the ridges of high ground where the dunes’ crests had weathered and flattened. Occasionally a giant silver terminalia or a monumental baobab soared seventy feet above the rest of the forest.
In the valleys, fields of sweet golden grasses and scattered giraffe acacias with flat tops gave the scene a park-like and cultivated aspect. Here also, in the lowest depressions, the recent rains had been trapped in the shallow water-holes, and the land seemed to hum and seethe with life.
Through the yellow grasses fresh tender shoots of delicate green appeared. Gardens of wild flowers, daisies and arum lilies and gladioli and fifty other varieties which Centaine did not recognize, sprang up as though at a magician’s flourish, delighting her with their colours and delicate beauty, and causing her to wonder anew at Africa’s prolificness. She picked the blooms and plaited them into necklaces for herself and H’ani, and the old woman preened like a bride.
‘Oh, I wish I had a mirror to show you how adorable you look.’ Centaine embraced her.
Even from the sky Africa gave of her abundance. There were flocks of quelea thick as hiving bees as they wheeled overhead, shrikes in the undergrowth with chests of purest glowing ruby, sandgrouse and francolin fat as domestic chickens, and water fowl on the brimming water-holes, wild duck and long-legged stilts and gaunt blue heron.
‘It’s all so beautiful,’ Centaine exulted. Each day’s journey was light and carefree after the hardships of the arid western plains, and when they camped, there was the untold luxury of unlimited water and a feast of wild fruits and nuts and game from O’wa’s snares and arrows.
One evening O’wa climbed high into the swollen fleshy branches of a monstrous baobab and smoked the hive that had inhabited its hollow trunk since his great-grandfather’s time and beyond. He came down with a gourd full of thick waxen combs running with dark honey redolent of the perfume of the yellow acacia blossoms.
Each day they met new species of wild animals: sable antelope, black as night with long scimitar horns that swept back almost to their hind quarters, and Cape buffalo with mournful drooping heads of massively bossed horn stinking like herds of domestic cattle.
‘They have come down from the big river and the swamps,’ O’wa explained. ‘They follow the water, and when it dries again they will go back into the north.’
In the night Centaine woke to a new sound infinitely more fearsome than the yelping of the black-backed jackal or the maniacal screams and sobs of the hyena packs. It was a storm of sound that filled the darkness, rising to an impossible crescendo and then dying away in a series of deep grunts. Centaine scrambled out of her little hut and ran to H’ani.
‘What was that, old grandmother? It is a sound to turn the belly to water!’ Centaine found she was trembling and the old woman hugged her.
‘Even the bravest of men trembles the first time he hears the roar of the lion,’ she placated her. ‘But do not fear, Nam Child, O’wa has made a charm to protect us. The lion will find other game tonight.’
But they crowded close to the fire all the rest of the night, feedin
g it with fresh logs, and it was obvious that H’ani had as little faith in her husband’s magical charms as Centaine did.
The lion pride circled their camp site, keeping at the very limit of the firelight so that Centaine caught only an occasional pale flicker of movement amongst the dark, encroaching bushes, but with the dawn their dreadful chorus receded as they moved away into the east, and when O’wa showed her the huge catlike pawmarks in the soft earth, he was garrulous with relief.
Then on the ninth morning after they had left the pan of ‘the big white place’, they were approaching another water-hole through the open mopani forests when ahead of them there was a crack like a shot of cannon and they all froze.
‘What is it, H’ani?’ But she waved Centaine to silence, and now she heard the crackle of breaking undergrowth and then suddenly a ringing blast of sound clear as a trumpet call.
Quickly O’wa tested the wind as Centaine had seen him do at the beginning of every hunt, and then he led them in a wide stealthy circuit through the forest until he stopped again beneath the spreading glossy green foliage of a tall mopani tree where he laid aside his weapons and his pack.
‘Come!’ he signalled to Centaine and, swiftly as a monkey, shinned up the trunk. Hardly hampered at all by her fruitful belly, Centaine followed him into the tree and from a fork in the top branches looked down into the valley of grassland beyond and the water-hole that it contained in its shallow bottom.
‘Elephant!’ She recognized the huge grey beasts instantly. They were streaming down the far slope of the valley towards the water, striding out with their ponderous rolling gait, heads swinging so that their enormous ears flapped, and their trunks rolling and reaching reflexively as they anticipated the sweet taste of water.
There were rangy old queens with tattered earlobes and the knuckles of their spines sticking out of their gaunt backs, young bulls with yellow ivories, tuskless youngsters, boisterous unweaned calves running to keep up with their dams and, at their head, the herd bull strode majestically.
He stood over ten feet tall at the shoulder and he was scarred and grey, thick baggy skin hanging from his knees and bunched between his back legs. His ears were spread like the mainsail of a tall ship, and his tusks were twice as long and thick as any of his lesser bulls.
He seemed aged and yet ageless, huge and rugged, possessed of a grandeur and mystery which seemed to Centaine to contain the very essence of this land.
Lothar De La Rey cut the spoor of the elephant herd three days after they had left the Cunene river, and he and his Ovambo trackers studied it carefully, spreading out and circling over the trodden earth like gundogs. When they assembled again, Lothar nodded at his headman.
‘Speak, Hendrick.’ The Ovambo was as tall as Lothar, but heavier in the shoulders. His skin was dark and smooth as molten chocolate.
‘A good herd,’ Hendrick gave his opinion, ‘forty cows, many with calf, eight young bulls.’ The dark turban of the warrior was wound around his proud head, and garlands of necklaces strung with trade beads hung down on to his muscular chest, but he wore riding breeches and a bandolier of ammunition over one shoulder.
‘And the herd bull is so old that his pads are smooth, so old that he can no longer chew his food and his dung is coarse with bark and twigs. He walks heavily on his forelegs, his ivory weighs him down, he is a bull to follow,’ Hendrick said, and shifted the Mauser rifle into his right hand and hefted it in anticipation.
‘The spoor is windblown,’ Lothar pointed out quietly, ‘and scratched over by insect and quail. Three days old.’
‘They are feeding,’ Hendrick opened his arms, ‘spread out, moving slowly, the calves slow them down.’
‘We will have to send the horses back,’ Lothar persisted. ‘We cannot risk them in the tsetse fly. Can we catch them on foot?’
Lothar unknotted his scarf and wiped his face thoughtfully. He needed that ivory. He had ridden north to the Cunene as soon as his scouts had sent him word that good rains had fallen. He knew that the new growth and surface water would lure the herds across the river out of Portuguese territory.
‘On foot we can make them in two days,’ Hendrick promised, but he was a notorious optimist and Lothar teased him.
‘And at each night’s camp we will find ten pretty Herero girls each carrying a beerpot on her head waiting for us.’
Hendrick threw back his head and laughed his deep growling laugh. ‘Three days then,’ he conceded with a chuckle, ‘and perhaps only one Herero girl, but very beautiful and obliging.’
Lothar pondered the chances a moment longer. It was a good bull, and the younger bulls would all carry mature ivory; even the cows would yield twenty pounds each, and ivory was commanding 22s 6d a pound.
He had twelve of his best men with him, though two would have to be sent back with the horses, but there were still enough riflemen to do the job. If they could come up with the herd they had a good chance of killing every animal that showed ivory.
Lothar De La Rey was flat broke. He had lost his family fortune, he had been declared a traitor and an outlaw for continuing the fight after the surrender of Colonel Franke, and there was a price on his head. Perhaps this would be his very last chance to repair his fortune. He knew the British well enough to realize that when the war was over, they would turn their attention to administering the new territories that they had won. Soon there would be district commissioners and officers in even the remotest areas, enforcing every detail of the law and paying special attention to the illegal hunting of ivory. The old free-booting days were probably numbered. This could be his last hunt.
‘Send back the horses!’ he ordered. ‘Take the spoor!’
Lothar wore light hunting veldskoen. His men were all tempered and hardened by long years of war, and they ran on the spoor, taking it in turns to come to the front and take the point, then dropping back to rest as another man hit the front.
They entered the fly-belt in the late afternoon, and the vicious little tsetse swarmed out of the shade of the forest to plague them, settling light-footed on their backs to drive their blood-sucking probosces deep into the flesh. The men cut switches of green leaves and brushed the tsetse off each other’s backs as they ran. By nightfall they had gained two days on the herd, and the spoor was so fresh that the ant-lions had not yet built their tiny funnel-shaped traps in the crisply trodden pad marks.
Darkness stopped them. They lay on the hard earth and slept like a pack of hounds, but when the moon climbed over the tops of the mopani trees, Lothar kicked them to their feet. The slant of moonlight was in their favour, outlining the spoor with a rim of shadow, and the raw trunks of the mopani trees, from which the feeding elephant had stripped the bark, shone like mirrors to guide them through the night, and when the sun rose they lengthened their stride.
An hour after sunrise they suddenly ran out of the tsetse-fly belt. The territory of these little winged killers was sharply demarcated; the border could be crossed in a hundred paces, from swarming multitudes to complete relief. The swollen itching lumps on the back of their necks were the only souvenirs of their onslaught.
Two hours before noon, they reached a good water-hole in one of the valleys of the mopani forest. They were only hours behind the herd.
‘Drink quickly,’ Lothar ordered, and waded knee-deep into the filthy water which the bathing elephant had churned to the colour of café au lait. He filled his hat and poured the water over his own head. His thick, red-gold locks streamed down over his face, and he snorted with pleasure. The water was acrid and bitter with the salt of the elephant urine – the beasts always emptied their bladders at the shock of cold water – but the hunters drank and refilled the water-bottles.
‘Quickly,’ Lothar chivvied them, keeping his voice low, for sound carries in the bush and the herd was very close.
‘Baas!’ Hendrick signalled him urgently, and Lothar waded to the edge of the pool, and skirted it quickly.
‘What is it?’
Wordles
sly the big Ovambo pointed at the ground. The spoor was perfectly imprinted in the stiff yellow clay, and it was so fresh that it overlaid that of the elephant herd; water was still seeping into the indentations.
‘Men!’ Lothar exclaimed. ‘Men have been here since the herd left.’
Hendrick corrected him harshly. ‘San, not men. The little yellow cattle-killers.’ The Ovambo were herdsmen, their cattle were their treasure and their deep love. ‘The desert dogs who cut the teats off the udders of our finest cows,’ the traditional revenge of the San for the atrocities committed upon them, ‘they are only minutes ahead of us. We could catch them within the hour.’
‘The sound of gunfire would carry to the herd.’ Lothar shared his headman’s hatred of the Bushmen. They were dangerous vermin, cattle-thieves and killers. His own great-uncle had been killed during one of the great Bushmen hunts of fifty years before; a tiny bone-tipped arrow had found the chink in his rawhide armour, and family history had recorded his death in every excruciating detail.
Even the English with their sickly sentimentality towards the black races had realized that there was no place in this twentieth-century world for the San. The standing orders of Cecil Rhodes’ famous British South Africa Police contained instructions that all San and wild dogs encountered on patrol were to be shot out of hand. The two species were considered as one.
Lothar was tempted, torn between the pleasure of performing the public service of following and destroying the pack of San, and of mending his own fortune by following the elephant.
‘The ivory,’ he decided. ‘No, the ivory is more important than culling a few yellow baboons.’
‘Baas – here!’ Hendrick had moved around the edge of the pool and stopped abruptly. His tone and the alert set of his head made Lothar hurry to him, and then sit quickly on his heels, the better to examine this new set of prints.
