1972 - A Story Like the Wind (54 page)

Perhaps he could do no better than to follow the example of trust being set him by Hintza? As he thought that, he remembered something else. It had been by following Hintza that he had found Xhabbo. He was not really so alone as he had been feeling. He had not only Hintza, but the promise of a companionship of his own choosing in Xhabbo. A swift calculation made him realize that Xhabbo could now be back with his people. Soon, therefore, it would become possible for Xhabbo to keep his promise to return to see François. This thought led to another. He must make sure that he was never away from Hunter’s Drift for too long in case he was not there to answer Xhabbo’s pre-arranged call.

His imagination thus drawn into the future, he increased his expectation of companionship in contemplation of another fact: that for the first time in the history of Hunter’s Drift they had European neighbours, and that there was the probability of companionship with a girl of approximately his own age, whom he had already nicknamed Nonnie. At this point his own dreaming self took over so successfully that it was impossible to tell who was sleeping more soundly, Hintza or François.

It seemed only a moment between his falling asleep and his departure, with Mopani and the three dogs, for the Monckton camp. Much to Ousie-Johanna’s disgust, they left before breakfast. Ousie-Johanna in her emotions was entirely subjective; to reject her food was to reject her. She had a capacity for being hurt that amounted to genius, matched only by the capacity for being instantly consoled. So François knew he had only to make an extra fuss of her for all to be well. Before leaving, he directed her feelings towards the future by stressing how both he and Mopani would be getting hungry all day for the dinner they knew she would have ready for them on their return. He was able to heighten her expectations by repeating a remark Mopani had made to him. ‘I think, Coiske, we ought to reckon with the possibility that after reading the message I have for him, Sir James might well have to come back to my camp and spend the night here first on the way. Do you mind?’

Ousie-Johanna’s mood cleared quickly at the thought of guests and she ordered François imperiously not to come without that satined figure of romance, the great Amelia, and her sweet and pretty little Nonnie, beside the ‘English Lord’, as Sir James had become in the process of anticipation, instead of a ‘badly brought-up
Rooinek
’.

The journey on horseback was uneventful, yet it was of great importance to François. Full of the thought that he had given to Xhabbo the night before, he questioned Mopani a great deal about the desert to the west, where the last remnants of Xhabbo’s people had found sanctuary. Mopani himself did not know the desert well, but he described in minute and fascinating detail how, even in the worst of droughts, his father had found it possible to live in the desert with the help of friendly Bushman guides. He told François that he did not know the Bushmen and the desert as well as his father had done, because all his leisure time had been taken up exploring an immense swamp which impinged deeply into the desert. This swamp was created by a great river which started high up in the mountains far away in Angola and ended as a vast desert delta. In it, Mopani said, there was a scattering of one of the most rare of all the branches of the Bushmen race, the River, or Water Bushmen. He had never himself encountered them because among the great papyrus reaches and everglades, and on low islands covered with dense copses and clusters of great soaring trees, tightly interlaced as any black, Victorian boot with fastening of monkey rope and other creepers, the Bushmen hid successfully from the strangers who in the past had brought nothing but destruction to them.

One reason why he, Mopani, had been so interested in the swamps was because of the strange myth believed implicitly by all the African peoples for some thousands of miles to the west and north. Namely, that in this swamp grew the original tree of life. This tree of life, according to the legend, had originally been in the keeping of ‘a white feminine presence’. Mopani did not know what else to call it. It was always difficult to find European parallels for African concepts, but he would be inclined to say that this legendary presence was a kind of white high priestess, or goddess. Mopani had even met Africans who claimed that there was a painting on a rock on the other side of the swamps and desert of this young white woman, standing on the smooth, steep flank of a sheltered rock among barren mountains, with a flower in her hand. The tree, he believed, was the nearest approach in the belief of all these millions of black people to a common religious temple, an equivalent of Sinai, from which originally they had received their commandments and to which their prophets and seers, in the past, went in times of trouble for consultation and guidance. According to the legend, these commandments issued always from the tree in song and, therefore, it would not surprise François to know the tree was also spoken of as the Singing Tree.

However, since the coming of the Matabele, who had so brutally invaded the interior, and hard after the Matabele the appearance of the all-powerful Europeans, who disrupted their way of life even more, the tree was reported to have ceased singing. Yet the legend persisted that a day would come when the tree would sing again and that the singing then would be a sign to all Africans, far and wide, that the time had come for them to unite again and drive both Matabele and European back to the Great Water from where they had come.

Mopani could not explain why, but he had longed to find this tree. He had tried repeatedly but never succeeded. All he had done was to prove to his own satisfaction that the people who lived closest to the great swamp still believed firmly in it and in its prophetic truth. He suspected that they knew exactly where the tree was, but would on no account share their knowledge with strangers, particularly a ‘red stranger’. Considering their terrible history, no one could blame them for their refusal.

It was most strange, he went on, that they should happen to be talking just then about this tree, and the River Bushmen, because only a week before the legend again had been brought to his notice. One night, out on patrol, he had overheard an African ranger talking. He was married to a woman of the Makoba, the tribe which lived around and within the fringes of the swamp. The ranger’s wife had recently returned from a long, round-about journey to her people, and Mopani heard her husband telling the other rangers that she had come back with a rumour that the Singing Tree was singing again. He thought that the Matabele who formed the majority of his staff would laugh off so foreign a rumour. To his amazement they all took it so seriously that they became unusually silent and grave.

Mopani, no doubt, would have carried on his account, and François had a mob of eager questions clamouring for answers in his mind, but already the conversation had taken so long that they found themselves at this point emerging from the bush and looking down on the wide Monckton clearing. All this was, perhaps, a pity, since the conversation is included in François’s story not for the light it can undoubtedly throw on the wide aboriginal soul of Africa dreaming of things to come, but solely for the reason that it was extremely relevant to what happened to him. In fact, the particular moment was already mobilized among the secret forces of the future, where this incomplete piece of knowledge would suddenly become relevant and fall, as if made to measure, into place in the complex pattern of François’s life.

At that moment, however, any elaboration of this significant legend was rendered impossible because Mopani broke off talking, pulled Noble to a halt and exclaimed, unbelievingly: ‘
Allah Wereld!
Now, there,
darem
, is a thing. Yes-no Coiske, it looks very much to me as if your Sir James is building right on top of that hill.’ He paused, as if even then he did not accept what he saw, patting Noble’s sweating neck as he did so. He then ended a long train of thought with an enigmatic, ‘But I dare say he knows his own business best.’

François had already of his own accord noticed what Sir James was up to, but in a sense had been prepared for it by his previous glimpse of the camp. In some curious way the impression he had of Sir James’s character made it obvious to him that he should build by preference on a hill. Sir James was a man who would feel compelled to ‘surmount’ any difficulties which confronted him. François knew, in the way only the young and the primitive can know their elders and betters, that Sir James would not, like Ouwa or their Matabele, try to seek a way round his difficulties. Hunter’s Drift was such a reassuring place in François’s mind, just because it did not set itself above or apart from the surrounding bush, but was a companion and contributor to it. But there now in front of them was the emerging blue-print of another kind of approach and intent, that of a man who would command the land on which he was settling, and so logically and inevitably would choose a commanding height from which to do so.

Mopani had hardly finished speaking when his conclusion was confirmed in the most convincing fashion. A great spurt of red dust suddenly shot up from the hill, to form a dense cloud all over it. A few seconds later it was followed by the thud of a heavy explosion. When the dust cleared, the skyline on both sides of the hill was dark with the silhouettes of men climbing to the top, obviously Sir James’s Cape-coloured builders coming out from behind the stones where they had sheltered during the blasting.

‘They’re not wasting any time down there,’ Mopani remarked, rather wryly. ‘And we’d better follow their example and waste no time either.’

At that Mopani pulled Noble into a gallop. François did the same with his horse, while Hintza, Nandi and !#grave;Swayo fanned out in front of the cavalry patrol like scouts on point duty. They rode fast down the clearing, sloping towards hill and river.

Their coming was not observed until they were in Sir James’s camp. He had pitched it on the far side of the hill, and Mopani and François had to pull up their horses into a slow walk when they reached the great ironstone boulders, which were strewn all over the ground at the foot of the hill. They made their way round its base so silently that they were almost among the tents before they were seen. Indeed, they just had time, before they were noticed, to take in the whole of the layout of the camp, and François was struck by the strict, mathematical pattern in which it had been organized.

He had never seen a camp quite as elaborate and, to his eyes, quite so acutely deliberate. Even their three dogs appeared to him to be somewhat overawed by its strangeness, for, instead of rushing at the camp to herald their coming as they would almost certainly have done with any other in François’s experience, they all three promptly sat down on their haunches’, their long pink tongues flickering in and out of their mouths. They prudently exchanged first impressions with each other before looking over their shoulders to make certain that Mopani and François were there in close support, in case of unexpected eventualities.

Immediately in front of them was, presumably, Sir James’s headquarters, laid out in a square with large bell tents at each corner, and a huge, rectangular marquee in the middle. This was obviously the camp kitchen, because from behind it rose a slow flutter of blue smoke. All round the tents, but also in straight lines meeting at right angles, the grass and brush had been cleared away, a measure which clearly spoke well for Sir James’s experience of life in the bush, since this was a highly necessary precaution in a world so full of scorpions, poisonous snakes and spiders. Yet, much as François approved of the measure, his eyes remained full of reserve because he knew that round tents like those, as well as those of the Matabele, demanded that any necessary clearing was done in a wide conforming circle and not an arbitrary square.

Moreover, from this square there ran, again at right angles, a straight path, meticulously cleared, to where a good furlong away the wagons of the Cape-coloured people had also been made to form not the normal defensive circle but another huge square with the space in between roofed over by the great buck tarpaulins of the wagons roped together. The squared wagons would have looked like a formidable itinerant fortress, had it not been for another redeeming circus touch brought to it by the brilliant dresses of the women and girls, who were laughing, talking and singing like speckled African starlings as they moved about, with the vivid splashes of colour of their laundry spread out on the bushes along the fringes of another immense square clearing.

François warmed, perhaps disproportionately, to this splash of colour and the shimmering sound in the distance, so much did they humanize the abstract pattern that Sir James had imposed on his native scene. He did not know that he was looking on the display of colour for the last time because, barely a quarter of an hour before, Sir James had rebuked the wagon master for such untidiness and proclaimed that on the far side of the wagons, out of sight of his own camp, proper laundry lines should be set up so that the washing of what was now quite a sizeable community could be dried in a more orderly, efficient and hygienic manner.

Mopani, however, was not surprised. He must have experienced this sort of camp many times before, because he quickly interrupted François’s as yet incomplete survey of the scene by exclaiming: ‘Huh! Planned and ordered and performed…latrines and all. The writer of the Queen’s own Service Manual could not have improved upon it. Yes-no, Coiske. There now is a real British service fellow’s idea of a camp. And make no mistake about it, I have known many far worse.’

Speaking, he nudged Noble gently forward and he and François rounded the first tent just in time to see Sir James coming towards them from the far side of the square with the Cape-coloured wagon master, who was also the head builder. Sir James, as always, was immaculately dressed, exactly in the manner François had first seen him except that, on this occasion, he had a long, fat roll of white papers, presumably plans for building, tucked under one arm. In his right hand he wielded a stout, brightly varnished shooting stick.