A Rock and a Hard Place

by George Zelt PhD

  “That is the question. Let’s make camp. We can talk about this and make a plan. Tomorrow morning we need to move on. If the guards find us here, we’ll be in jail, after they and their dogs jump us.”

  At dusk the desert became cool and the stars so clear that every mythological configuration in the sky seemed very close to us. Our fire, made with wood we carried on our roof rack, was nestled against the steep side of the dune I had driven up hours ago. We sat with light jackets on, watching and sipping coffee as it cast a restless half-circle of light and warmth over us. Above, a single row of sand grains formed the knife-edge crest of a beautifully sculptured wave. At times the uncanny stillness was penetrated by a slight whisper of wind, immediately followed by a powerful, explosive gust that tore at the crest. The sand grains shot forward, tumbling in one violent yet predictable instant. With this, the smoking sand dune grew and moved imperceptibly forward with timeless dignity. Patrick and I, thoughtful of our day’s activities, gazed at our campfire and talked long into the night about the strange Bushman grave and his collection of stones and about the origin of the diamonds buried in the sands surrounding us.

  Our evening story began tens of millions of years ago. Then, to the southeast of us and at least five hundred miles inland from the coast, in South Africa, diamonds formed. Diamonds are created in the earth’s mantle under tremendous pressure. They are transported to the surface by deep-source fiery volcanic eruptions that often form cylindrical kimberlite rock pipes, also called blue ground. The blue ground is identified by diamond prospectors. Over the ages these rocks were eroded by wind and rain. Their contents, including the extremely hard diamonds, were carried along a prehistoric drainage network of rivers, including the current Orange River, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. There the diamonds were carried north by strong long-shore drift produced by powerful prevailing coastal winds and the cold Benguela Current. These forces deposited diamonds sporadically along the desert shore of the African coast. Over millions of years the waters gradually receded from the land, leaving that ancient shoreline where we now sat, some fifty miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean.

  Winds and shifting sand reconcentrated the inland diamonds, causing them to lodge in the exposed cracks and fissures of the solid rock beneath the sand. Ancient streams then sporadically carried the diamonds back toward the receding ocean. In the early 1900s, diamonds were found scattered throughout these inland expanses all the way to the coast. Mining rights were later granted by the South African government to De Beers; they sealed off the zone from the public and hired hundreds of black men to collect the plentiful diamonds.

  Wandering about, our Bushman might have come across men gathering the small, hard shards that looked like glass. Muffled against the sand-laden wind and slowly moving about on their hands and knees in a line across the valley floor, these men, likely neighboring pastoral Khoikhoi (or “Hottentots,” as the early Dutch settlers called them) who had migrated northward to the region, would have looked very peculiar to a nomadic Bushman.

  Hanging around each man’s neck as he crawled along and swinging with the slow rhythmic movements of each limb was a container like a jam tin. In this the Khoikhoi dropped the diamonds they had picked up from crevices in the bedrock or from whatever else had caused the diamonds to stop tumbling. For each diamond found, the white overseer who walked behind them paid a few pennies.

  Our Bushman, very afraid of both the white and black men, would not have approached them. In those days the Bushman was regarded as nothing more than an animal. Older Bushmen were killed on sight, and the children and young women were used as slaves. (In fact, Bushmen had been chased north since the 1600s and 1700s, when the Europeans first settled the Cape Town area.)

  In the early 1930s, neither Khoikhoi nor Bushmen would have understood why the strange, hard little stones were of value. The Bushmen had no practical use for pebbles that were too brittle to be hammered into arrowheads and too hard to be strung into necklaces. Also, they had no desire to accumulate material possessions, for there were no privileges or benefits from such ownership.

  Yet, our Bushman seems to have collected the glassy stones and colorful pebbles. Why?

  Curious, he probably crept into the area where the Khoikhoi worked. Perhaps he did that as they slept in the bright moonlight that reflected off the sand-white desert floor. His unusually keen eyesight would have picked out the tiny, glasslike objects among the Precambrian rocks and windblown sand. I imagined him later shattering them gently with a rock to expose fresh surfaces and crystal faces that flashed colors at him when held up to the strong African sun.

  Inquisitive, as artists are, he would have studied them closely and discovered the light was shattered into the rainbow hues of the spectrum. Red as bright as a severed artery, green as grass after a rain, the violet in a rare thunderstorm. As an artist, he would have been mystified, if not overwhelmed, by it. With this magic, the Bushman was able to compare the richest hues of the firestones to those he coveted for his rock paintings.

  We speculated on how he died.

  Perhaps the day came when he was too old to keep up with his band and was benevolently left on his own to die. Traditionally he would have received an ostrich eggshell filled with water as a canteen and whatever bits of food his small band could spare. This, together with his bow and arrows, the diamond-bearing pouch, a skin bag containing the eggshell, and his paint pots were all the possessions he had. The withered little man could have hobbled off, wearing some red fabric a Khoikhoi had left unattended. (Bushmen believed no one owned anything.) Deep into the desert, he looked for a place to die with dignity, as he knew his time had come.

  What of the charred tortoiseshell we had found with his body? Surely his will to survive made him search for food. He would have been ecstatic to see a row of small, sand-filled indentations partially exposed. He knew from the tracks that the reptile was crawling fast and, like him, must rest soon. A short time later, the hunter-artist likely located the tortoise near the front of a soaring dune.

  Our Bushman had now found food. Rotating a stick among a small pile of dry wisps of grass, he created a modest fire. Soon the reptile simmered in its own shell, overturned. It was his last meal. Perhaps as he sat beside the fire, he decided he would never leave the dune. In a night or two the hyenas would find him and rip him to pieces. Thinking of that, he became aware of the soft showers of sand as they welcomed him into the desert’s womb. Perhaps they would bury him? Perhaps someone else would come along and bury him?

  After drinking and eating from the charred shell, the hunter-artist slowly and painfully climbed the three-hundred-foot-high dune and waited on the crest for the gust of wind to find him. He faced the day of death, the day of the hyena, as he soared off the dune with the stones we let him keep forever.

  Chapter 2

  1975: Into Apartheid Africa

  The sight of corrugated-tin shacks dotting barren, flat, sandy gravel startled me. They stood bundled together in loose groups, separated by barriers of old automobiles, driftwood, doors, broken chairs, and tangled rusty wire, carelessly linked together. Wood-smoke genies puffing from chimneys disappeared like hope. A twirling dust devil leaped from the trodden earth, lifting up a newspaper page a hundred feet. It looked like the flailing wings of a startled seagull. I watched it collapse as quickly as it had formed. Behind it were ungainly outhouses, propped up in trampled areas where a few chickens pecked and a goat scratched. This was the Cape Flats, a dumping ground for apartheid, a home of segregated townships, and an ill-advised attempt to mold the country into divisions probably as secure as the barriers I saw.

  We drove slowly along the N-2, Settler’s Way. A driver from the University of Cape Town (UCT) had picked me up from the Metropolitan Airport. I was there to study geology in the Precambrian Research Unit (PRU), a part of the UCT geology department. My aim was to obtain the last and highest degree—a doctorate in science, or a PhD. I had four degrees now, two from American universities and tw
o from the University of Helsinki, Finland, where I’d just come from. I was fascinated by knowledge, one of those people who follow their dreams.

  “Separation between white and black,” my “colored” UCT driver stoically explained to me. He was a descendant of interracial sexual unions between Western European males who coupled with Khoisan, Bantu, and Asians in the early seventeenth century. Rounding off the mix, female slaves from the Dutch East Indies were also brought into the Cape Colony. The resulting people were simply called “colored.” I wondered if I would be stepping back into the American South. Would this experience be like living history?

  My hometown is Buffalo, in western New York. I left it behind when I was seventeen, slipping away into what I believed was a gilded tomorrow—the world of adventure and imagination, of the smell of summer grass and wild things hidden in tall trees and secret burrows. My heroes were men like James Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne, David Livingstone, Mark Twain, and Sven Hedin. These were the stepping-stones I trod on, the glorious wonders and innocence of youth that had brought me here.

  I would soon learn that Africa was a land of unusual extremes with often no middle ground; it could be an ethereal place where life and death rose as naturally as the sun. Now, however, my thoughts were simpler: What would I find at the university?

  The PRU’s director, Dr. Manfred, was in his mid-thirties, tall, handsome, charismatic, and a classic efficient German. He had invited me to join him a year earlier. I was given a separate room to work in and introduced to six other graduate students from Britain, Ireland, Holland, and Rhodesia. Basically everything was new to us and we relied on Manfred for orientation. Unfortunately, he was mostly concerned with his own research and accordingly rather impassive about students. Still, he did provide assistance to the point our British colleague was able, in stiff upper lip, to declare, “We will benefit from whatever he casts off.”

  I spent several days settling in, which included finding an apartment to live in. My program, I quickly learned, was to be mostly self-education, in that there were no classes to attend. Manfred suggested I investigate metamorphic zonation in a portion of South Africa called Namaqualand and then write a dissertation on the subject. Specifically, I would study a fifty-mile east-west strip of land. It was about half a mile wide, including long stretches of two rivers, the Buffels and Swartlintjies, which appeared as weak, squiggly blue lines on our map. That meant they were dry rivers, probably active only once a year with the spring rains. I pictured them being bone-dry and crawling with snakes, scorpions, and other members of a desiccated community. After all, the area was within the semidesert northwest portion of South Africa called Namaqualand.

  When I asked Manfred about snakebite kits and reminded him I would be turning over rocks, he said, “Oh, don’t worry about the snakes.” His knee-jerk confidence and disregard for obstacles reminded me of a used-car salesman. As long as the buyer had a driver’s license and could drive the car out of the lot (and preferably out of sight), it didn’t matter if the wheels wobbled. That was Manfred: He made the arrangement, grinned with accomplishment, and then moved on.

  The good news was when the rivers flowed each year, they cleared off the windblown sand that covered everything, leaving the underlying billion-year-old Precambrian rock types visible. Those rocks would be the subject of my work. Considering our earth is about five billion years old, the Precambrian period contained some of the oldest rocks visible to man. They were difficult to study, as they had been beaten up quite a bit over time. Still, the violent episodes of wind flagellation, weather shifts, and physical changes over millions of years made them more fascinating.

  Precambrian rocks form the strong, stable continental shields we live on. They are the building blocks of our planet. My task would be to study their geochemistry, metamorphic petrology, and structural geology features in my specified area. What had happened to them since they were born? I would add that information to existing worldwide Precambrian-rock family trees. To do that, I’d spend portions of four years living with them in the field. After some time, a relationship would develop. It was a bit like getting to know a woman. You whispered to her, slept with her, licked her, and scrutinized every part of her. Then she talked intimately to you. Rocks did the same, only in silence; you felt what they told you. As my rocks were very old, they had many secrets—deep ones.

  Before long, and after reading as much as I could about my field area, someone told me, “It’s better to get there soon and acclimatize before the appalling summer heat begins.” Further comments made me wonder if anyone could get used to temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Wearing denim jeans, a blue T-shirt, ankle boots, and carrying a wide-brimmed leather hat, I signed out the new white Land Rover allocated to me. My destination, the town of Springbok, lay about 350 miles due north of Cape Town. I would probably return in two months or so and go out again, rotating as needed over several years until I covered my field area.

  * * *

  Off I went, towing a small, one-man trailer along the N-7, which was and still is the main north-south road through the western region of South Africa. The little-traveled two-lane way links Afrikaner (essentially white people of Dutch descent speaking Afrikaans-Dutch) towns, which pop up like welcome stepping-stones across emptiness. The flatlands of the Cape stop dead at a steep and rocky escarpment about one hundred miles north of Cape Town. The road struggles and hairpins its way up the long lip of the cliff face. My Land Rover made it to the pinnacle, struggling in the lowest gear like an exhausted runner. Once I gained the top, however, I felt as if I were coming out of the neck of a funnel. The mysterious, barren heartland of South Africa opened up before me, a huge span of emptiness. Stony sand to the right, stony sand to the left, spidery shrubs here and there, and nothing else straight ahead as far as the curve of the earth. Above, the blazing yellow sun of Africa poured down, coloring the sand in its own image. Heat waves rose, creating a hazy, shimmering curtain that was always in the distance.

  The road north from the escarpment is flat. It boasts neither trees nor grass, except that clinging to the banks of the spectacular Olifants River, which it parallels to a town called Klawer. Announced by a boisterous concert of birds hidden in its greenery, the Olifants is a fantasy—a gift to the dry land, begun in the nearby Cederberg mountain range.

  A few carts, made of simple wooden platforms set on back axles taken from old cars and pulled by nodding donkeys, eased on to a verge as I approached. Mostly they were laden with plump hessian sacks of flour and corn. The drivers were Cape coloreds, hunched over and wearing slouch hats with wide brims, looking so lethargic they could have been deceased. I thought that even if a donkey died in harness, it would take some time for the drivers to react. The air had that fungus whiff and feel of talcum dust and nothing at all. It was Africa.

  Near every town, flocks of off-white sheep drifted down the roadway, nudged languidly by their unhurried shepherds. Nibbling at scattered grass blades and things not visible, they never lifted their determined heads from the dust, which rose in small clouds around their pawing hoofs and followed the flock like the tail of a comet.

  Farther along, as lonely as a lighthouse, the little town of Van Rhynsdorp (now called Vanrhynsdorp) appeared: a simple, whitewashed, one-story concrete-block collection fenced on the roadside by a forlorn row of telephone poles marching off into the distance. In keeping with the overall sluggish impression, the Troe Troe River crawled desperately through the town as if on its sad way to a slow, dry, strangulated death.

  However, Van Rhynsdorp is the gateway to Namaqualand. It’s where rooibos (bush tea) was discovered in the early 1770s. The little town was once inhabited by the Khoikhoi, some of whom lived in caves in the nearby Gifberg and Matzikamma mountain ranges. The Khoikhoi were driven north from the very southern tip of Africa by white settlers. They, like the equally pursued Bushmen, have myths about their beginnings. Actually, a great number of stories told in Africa relate to people’s origins. One in pa
rticular was told to me.

  It starts like many Bushmen stories: Long ago, when the sun was very small and the earth was young, the Bushmen and all black people lived together. In their village there was a long rope made partially of strong cattle leather and partially of weak twisted plant fibers. The two pieces were tied together with a knot in the center.

  One day a Bantu said he would use the rope and picked up the leather end. At the same time a Bushman said he would use the rope and picked up the fiber end. The two men quarreled.

  Other Bantu and Bushmen came to help their friends, and soon there was a huge tug-of-war, both sides pulling and struggling. The knot suddenly broke, and the Bantu were thrown backward, rolling and tumbling far away to a country where the grass is green and the cattle grow big and fat.

  The Bushmen also rolled backward, in the opposite direction, far to the north, stopping only when they reached dry desert. They live there to this day, hunting and gathering without cattle.

  The Bushmen say that if they have a chance to grab the rope again, they must take the leather end.

  Once a year, in August or September, spring rains come and the drab fields surrounding Van Rhynsdorp produce a vast sea of wildflowers in an impossible spectrum of colors. After the briefest pollination honeymoon, everything wilts—then goats and sheep feast on what remains.

  I drove on to Springbok, a frontier crossroads town with a little central hill from which sand roads diverged. There were no streetlights or trees to define the roads, just packed, gravelly sand. People parked most anywhere and walked along rough sidewalks defined by logic and footprints. There was a preponderance of Land Rovers, jeeps, and pickup trucks—bakkies.

  A couple of restaurants, a wonderful screen-door butcher shop hissing with the sound of knives being sharpened, a down-to-earth furniture store, and several clothing stores defined the business portion of town, as well as two comparatively large, old hotels for white people. One had a sweeping wooden veranda surrounded by gnarled trees. Old men with granite faces and wearing huge, old brimmed hats sat smoking, coughing, and dozing. Afrikaners, mainly—they didn’t laugh much, I learned, unless they drank. Women were not allowed.