by Wilbur Smith
In one of the overhanging branches of a paper-bark tree, near the crest of the ridge, just at the level of Lothar’s shoulder, a lock of human hair was caught, torn from the girl’s scalp as she ducked beneath the branch. It was curly and springy, as long as his forearm, and it glistened in the sunlight like black silk. Lothar wound it carefully around his finger, and then when none of his men was watching, he opened the locket that hung around his neck on a golden chain. In the recess was a miniature of his mother. He placed the curl of hair over it and snapped the lid of the locket closed.
Lothar kept them hunting for signs until it was dark, and in the morning he started them again as soon as they could see the ground at their feet. He split them into two teams. Hendrick took one team along the eastern side of the ridge, and Lothar worked the western extremity where the calcrete merged into the Kalahari sands, trying to discover the spot at which their quarry had left the ridge again.
Four days later they had still not intersected the spoor, and two of the Ovambo had deserted. They slipped away during the night, taking their rifles with them.
‘We will lose the rest of them,’ Hendrick warned him quietly. ‘They are saying that this is a madness. They cannot understand it. Already we have lost the elephant herd, and there is no profit in this business any longer. The spoor is dead. The San and the woman have slipped away. You will not find them now.’
Hendrick was right – it had become an obsession. A single glimpse of a woman’s face had driven him mad.
Lothar sighed, and slowly turned away from the ridge on which the pursuit had foundered.
‘Very well.’ He raised his voice so that the rest of his men, who had been trailing disconsolately, could hear him. ‘Drop the spoor. It is dead. We are going back.’ The effect upon them was miraculous. Their step quickened and their expressions sparkled to life again.
Lothar remained on the ridge as the gang started back down the slope. He stared out over the forest towards the east, towards the mysterious interior where few white men had ventured, and he fingered the locket at his throat.
‘Where did you go? Was it that way, deeper into the Kalahari? Why didn’t you wait for me – why did you run?’ There were no answers, and he dropped the locket back into the front of his shirt. ‘If I ever cut your spoor again, you won’t lose me so easily, my pretty. Next time I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth,’ he whispered, and turned back down the slope.
O’wa jinked back and followed the ridge towards the south, keeping just below the crest, driving the women as hard as they could run heavily laden over the rough footing. He would not allow them to rest, although Centaine was beginning to tire badly, and pleaded with him over her shoulder.
In the middle of the afternoon he allowed them to drop their satchels and sprawl on the rocky slope while he scurried on down to reconnoitre the contact line of the sands and the calcrete intrusion for a point at which to make the crossover. Halfway down he paused and sniffed; picking up the faint stench of carrion, he turned aside and found the carcass of an old zebra stallion. Reading the sign, O’wa saw that hunting lions had caught him as he crossed the ridge and dragged him down. The kill was weeks old, the tatters of skin and flesh had dried hard and the bones were scattered amongst the rocks.
O’wa searched quickly and found all four of the zebra’s feet intact. The hyena had not yet crunched them to splinters. With the clasp knife he prised the horny sheath of the actual hooves from the bony mass of the metatarsals, and hurried back to fetch the women. He led them down to the edge of the soft ground, and knelt in front of Centaine.
‘I will take Nam Child off, and then come back for you,’ he told H’ani as he bound the hoof sheaths to Centaine’s feet with sansevieria twine.
‘We must hurry, old grandfather, they could be close behind us.’ H’ani sniffed the light breeze anxiously, and cocked her head towards each small forest sound.
‘Who are they?’ Centaine had recovered not only her breath, but her curiosity and reason. ‘Who is chasing us? I haven’t seen or heard a thing. Are they people like me, O’wa, are they my people?’
Swiftly H’ani cut in before O’wa could reply. ‘They are black men. Big black men from the north, not your people.’ Although she and O’wa had both seen the white man at the edge of the glade when they looked back from the ridge, they had reached agreement in a few words that they would keep Nam Child with them.
‘Are you sure, H’ani?’ Centaine teetered on the zebra hooves, like a little girl in her first high-heeled shoes. ‘They were not pale-skinned like me?’ The dreadful possibility that she was fleeing from her rescuers had suddenly occurred to her.
‘No! No!’ H’ani fluttered her hands in extreme agitation. The child was so close to birth – to witness that moment was the last thing in her life that she still cared about. ‘Not pale-skinned like you.’ She thought of the most horrific being in San mythology. ‘They are big black giants who eat human flesh.’
‘Cannibals!’ Centaine was shocked.
‘Yes! Yes! That is why they pursue us. They will cut the child from your womb and—’
‘Let’s go, O’wa!’ Centaine gasped. ‘Hurry! Hurry!’
O’wa, with the other pair of hooves strapped to his own feet, guided Centaine away from the ridge, walking behind her and creating the illusion of a zebra having left the rocky ground and wandered away into the forest.
A mile from the ridge he hid Centaine in a clump of thorny scrub, removed the hooves from her feet, reversed the pair upon his own feet and set off back to fetch H’ani. The two San, each of them wearing hoof sandals, tracked back along the same trail and when they reached Cen-taine’s hiding-place, discarded the hooves and all three of them fled into the east.
O’wa kept them going all that night, and in the dawn while the women slept exhausted, he circled back on their trail and guarded it against the possibility that the pursuers had not been deceived by his ruse with the zebra hooves. Although he could discover no evidence of pursuit, for three more days and nights he force-marched, allowing no cooking fires, and used every natural feature to anti-track and hide their trail.
On the third night, he was confident enough to tell the women, ‘We can make fire.’ And by its ruddy wavering light he danced with dedicated frenzy and sang the praise of the spirits in turn, including Mantis and Eland, for, as he explained seriously to Centaine, it was uncertain who had aided their escape, who had directed the wind to carry the warning scent to them in the first place, and who had subsequently placed the zebra carcass so conveniently to hand. ‘It is necessary, therefore, to thank them all.’ He danced until moonset, and the next morning slept until sunrise. Then they resumed the familiar leisurely pattern of march, and even halted early that first day when O’wa discovered a colony of spring-hare.
‘This is the last time we can hunt, the spirits are most insistent. No man of the San may kill any living thing within five days’ march of “the Place of All Life”,’ he explained to Centaine, as he selected long whippy saplings of the grewia bush, peeled them and lashed them together until he had a strong flexible rod almost thirty feet long. On the final section, he left a side branch that grew back at an acute angle to the main stem, like a crude fish-hook, and he sharpened the point of this hook and hardened it in the fire. Then he spent a long time carefully examining the burrows of the spring-hare colony, before selecting one which suited his design.
While the women knelt beside him, he introduced the hooked end of the rod into the opening of the burrow, and like a chimney-sweep worked it gently down the shaft, deftly guiding it around the subterranean curves and bends until almost the entire length was down in the earth.
Suddenly the rod pulsed strongly in his hands, and immediately O’wa struck, jerking back like a hardline fisherman who feels the pull of the fish.
‘He is kicking at the rod now, trying to hit it with his back legs,’ O’wa grunted, pushing the rod deeper into the hole, tempting the trapped spring-hare to kick ou
t at it again.
This time, as he struck, the rod came alive in his hands, kicking and twitching and jerking.
‘I have hooked him!’ He threw his weight back on the rod, driving the sharpened wooden point deeper into the animal’s flesh. ‘Dig, H’ani. Dig, Nam Child!’
The two women flew at the soft friable earth with their staves, digging down swiftly. The muffled shrieks of the hooked spring-hare grew louder as they came nearer to the end of the long gaff, until finally O’wa heaved the furry creature clear of its earth. It was the size of a large yellow cat, and it leaped about wildly on the end of the pliant rod on its powerful kangaroo back legs, until H’ani despatched it with a swinging blow of her stave.
By nightfall they had killed two more spring-hare, and after they had thanked them, they feasted on the sweet tender roasted flesh, the last they would eat for a long time.
In the morning when they set out again on the final leg of the journey, a sharp hot wind blew into their faces.
Although it was taboo for O’wa to hunt, the Kalahari bloomed in a rich and rare abundance both below and above the ground. There were flowers and green leafy plants to be eaten as salads, roots and tubers, fruits and protein-rich nuts, and the water-holes, all of them brimming, were easy marches apart. Only the wind hampered them, standing steadily into their faces, hot and abrasive with blown sand, forcing them to cover their faces with their leather shawls and lean into it.
The mixed herds of fat handsome zebra and ungainly blue wildebeest with their scraggy manes and skinny legs standing out on the wide pans or on the grassy glades turned their rumps into the sultry blast. The wind ripped the talcum-fine dust off the surface of the pans and whirled it into the sky, turning the air misty, so the sun itself was a hazy orange globe and the horizons shrank in upon them.
The dust floated on the surface of the water-holes in a thin scum, and it turned to mud in their nostrils and grated between their teeth. It formed little wet beads in the corners of their eyes and dried and cracked their skins so that H’ani and Centaine had to roast and crush the seeds of the sour plum tree to extract the oil to dress their skins and the soles of their feet.
However, with each day’s march the old people became stronger, more active and excited. They seemed less and less affected by the scouring wind. There was a new jauntiness in their step and they chattered animatedly to each other on the march, while Centaine faltered and dropped far behind, almost as she had done at the beginning.
On the fifth evening after crossing the ridge, Centaine staggered into the camp that the San had already set up on the edge of yet another open pan. Centaine lay on the bare earth, too hot and exhausted to gather grass for her bed.
When H’ani came to her with food, she pushed it away petulantly. ‘I don’t want it. I don’t want anything. I hate this land – I hate the heat and the dust.’
‘Soon,’ H’ani soothed her, ‘very soon we will reach the Place of All Life, and your baby will be born.’
But Centaine rolled away from her. ‘Leave me – just leave me alone.’
She woke to the cries of the old people, and she dragged herself up, feeling fat and dirty and unrested, even though she had slept so late that the sun was already tipping the tops of the trees on the far side of the pan. Immediately she saw that the wind had dropped during the night and most of the dust had settled out of the air. The residue transformed the dawn to a kaleidoscope of flamboyant colour.
‘Nam Child, do you see it!’ H’ani called to her, and then trilled like a Christmas beetle, inarticulate with excitement. Centaine straightened up slowly and stared at the scene that the dust clouds had obscured the previous evening.
Across the pan a great whale-backed mountain rose abruptly out of the desert, steep-sided and with a symmetrically rounded summit. Aglow with all the rich reds and golds of the dawn, it looked like a headless monster. Parts of the mountain were bald and bare, glowing red rock and smooth cliffs, while in other places it was heavily forested;
trees much taller and more robust than those of the plain crowned the summit or grew up the steep sides. The strange reddish light suffused with dust and the silences of the African dawn cloaked the entire mountain in majestic serenity.
Centaine felt all her miseries and her woes fall away as she stared at it.
‘“The Place of All Life”!’ As H’ani said the name, her agitation passed and her voice sank to a whisper. ‘This is the sight we have travelled so far and so hard to look upon for the last time.’
O’wa had fallen silent as well, but now he bobbed his head in agreement. ‘This is where we will make our peace at last with all the spirits of our people.’
Centaine felt the same sense of deep religious awe that had overcome her when first she had entered the cathedral of Arras, holding her father’s hand, and looked up at the gemlike stained glass in the high gloomy recesses of the towering nave. She knew that she stood on the threshold of a holy place, and she sank slowly to her knees and clasped her hands over the swell of her stomach.
The mountain was further off than it had seemed in the red light of the dawn. As they marched towards it, it seemed to recede rather than draw closer. As the light changed, so the mountain changed its mood. It became remote and austere, and the stone cliffs glittered in the sunlight like a crocodile’s scales.
O’wa sang as he trotted at the head of the file:
See, spirits of the San
We come to your secret place
With clean hands, unstained by blood.
See, spirit of Eland and Mantis,
We come to visit you with
Joyous hearts, and songs for your amusement—
The mountain changed again, began to quiver and tremble in the rising heat. It was no longer massive stone, but rippled like water and wavered like smoke.
It broke free of the earth and floated in the air on a shimmering silver mirage.
O, bird mountain
That flies in the sky
We bring you praises.
O, Elephant Mountain, greater than
Any beast of earth or sky, we hail you,
O’wa sang, and as the sun swung through its zenith and the air cooled, so the Mountain of All Life settled to earth again and loomed high above them.
They reached the scree slopes, loose stone and debris that lay piled against the cliffs, and paused to look up at the high summit. The rocks were painted with lichen growth, sulphur-yellow and acid-green, and the little hyrax rock rabbits had stained the cliffs with seepage from their middens, like tears from an elephant’s eyes.
On a ledge three hundred feet above them stood a tiny antelope. It took fright and with a bleat like a child’s penny whistle, shot straight up the cliff, leaping from ledge to unseen ledge with all the nimbleness of a chamois, until it disappeared over the crest.
They scrambled up the steep scree slope until they touched the base of the cliff. The rock was smooth and cool and overhung them, leaning out at a gentle angle like a vast cathedral roof.
‘Be not angry, ye spirits, that we come into your secret place,’ H’ani whispered, and tears were coursing down her ancient yellow cheeks. ‘We come in humble peace, kind spirits, we come to learn what our offence has been, and how we can make amends.’
O’wa reached out and took his wife’s hand and they stood like two tiny naked children before the smooth rock.
‘We come to sing for you and to dance,’ O’wa whispered. ‘We come to make peace, and then with your favour to be reunited with the children of our clan who died of the great fever in a far place.’
There was such vulnerability in this intimate moment that Centaine felt embarrassed to watch them. She drew away from the two old people, and wandered alone along the narrow gallery before the cliff. Suddenly she stopped, and stared up in wonder at the high rock wall that hung out over her head.
‘Animals,’ she whispered.
She felt the goose-flesh of superstitious fear rise along her forearms, for the wa
lls were decorated with paintings, frescoes of weirdly wrought animals, the childlike simplicity of form giving them a beauty that was dreamlike, and yet a touching resemblance to the beasts that they depicted. She recognized the darkly massive outlines of tusked elephants and horned rhinoceros, the wildebeest and sassaby with horns like crescent moons marching in closely packed phalanxes across the rock walls.
‘And people,’ Centaine whispered, as she picked out the sticklike human shapes that ran in pursuit of the herds of wild game. Fairy beings, the San’s view of himself, armed with bows and crowned with wreaths of arrows, the men adorned with proudly erect penises, disproportionately large, and the women with prominent breasts and buttocks, the badges of feminine beauty.
The paintings climbed so high up the sheer walls that the artists must have built platforms, in the fashion of Michelangelo, to work from. The perspectives were naive, one human figure larger than the rhinoceros he was hunting, but this seemed to deepen the enchantment, and Centaine lost herself in wonder, sinking down at last to examine and admire a lovely flowing waterfall of overlapping eland, ochre and red, with dewlaps and humped shoulders, so lovingly depicted that their special place in San mythology could not be overlooked.
H’ani found her there, and squatted beside her.
‘Who painted these things?’ Centaine asked her.
‘The spirits of the San, long, long ago.’
‘Were they not painted by men?’
‘No! No! Men do not have the art, these are spirit drawings.’
So the artists’ skills were lost. Centaine was disappointed. She had hoped that the old woman was one of the artists and that she would have an opportunity to watch her work.
‘Long ago,’ H’ani repeated, ‘before the memory of my father or my grandfather.’
Centaine swallowed her disappointment and gave herself up to enjoyment of the marvellous display.
There was little left of the daylight, but while it lasted, they picked their way slowly around the base of the cliff, walking with heads thrown back to marvel at the gallery of ancient art. At places the rock had broken away, or the storms and winds of the ages had destroyed the frescoes, but in the protected gulleys and beneath the sheltering overhangs the paint seemed so fresh, and the colours so vivid, that they might have been painted that very day.
