Mafeking Road (11 page)

“God, that was terrible,” Hendrik van Jaarsveld ejaculated, “and to think that it might have been me.”

Then he cupped his hands and called. A few minutes later Piet Uys emerged from a clump of white thorn-bushes, carrying a Mauser.

“What's wrong, Hendrik?” Piet Uys asked. But there was no need for the other man to reply. There was that body lying beside the ox-wagon.

“Mamba?” Piet enquired.

“Brown mamba,” Hendrik van Jaarsveld answered.

The two men took off their hats in silence. There was nothing to be done about it. For in the Marico District death and brown mamba are synonymous terms, and everybody knows that you can't do very much about death.

For a bite from a bakkop or a puff-adder or a ringhals, a sharp knife and permanganate of potash crystals are nearly always
efficacious. But when a man is bitten by a mamba it is different. Then it is the Lord's will that a prayer should be said over his open grave, and that a hymn should be sung before the hole in the veld is covered up again with the red earth.

 

Hendrik van Jaarsveld and Piet Uys had trekked from Schweizer-Reneke because of the drought. With their wagons and cattle they had journeyed through the Northern Transvaal, coming to a halt at the foot of the Dwarsberge, where there was pasture.

They had been at this outspan for several weeks, with little to do besides shooting springbok in the vlaktes. But now they had to set about burying the kaffir herdsman.

The two white men stood by while the kaffirs dug the grave. Hendrik van Jaarsveld and two kaffirs then proceeded to wrap an old blanket round the body. They did their work awkwardly for, as undertakers, they were still amateurs. The herdsman had died with his left hand pressed under his right armpit, in an attempt to relieve the pain in his finger where the snake had bitten him.

When they moved him, the corpse's hand flapped stiffly on to his thigh. Hendrik turned his head away, but not before he had seen the grim mass into which the mamba's fangs had converted the dead man's hand.

“Yes, they say the hand is the worst place for a snakebite,” Piet Uys remarked casually from where he stood, a few paces off. “The hand or the face. They say that if a mamba bites you in the hand you're dead before you strike the ground.”

To Hendrik van Jaarsveld his companion's words sounded harsh and grating. He wished Piet would keep quiet. Like the kaffirs. They knew that death was a solemn thing. And the veld knew it, too. The veld was still – very still. Always the veld is still in the presence of death.

Suddenly Hendrik grew afraid. It was a vague fear he couldn't understand. But it made him feel very lonely. He seemed to be alone under the sky with the dead herdsman. The corpse and he seemed to be alone together. Piet and the kaffirs were apart from him somehow. He remembered having had that same feeling once before when he had shot a ribbok.

He had disembowelled the ribbok and was fastening two of its legs together so that he could carry it home across his shoulders. It was then that that strange feeling came to him, a feeling of intimacy and understanding with the dead ribbok. Now, when he was standing over the herdsman and getting ready to lower him into the grave, that queer sense of companionship with the dead came to him again. It was frightening.

In the heat of the tropic noonday Hendrik shivered.

Piet Uys spoke again.

“Did you see the mamba?” he asked.

“Yes,” Hendrik answered shortly.

“Did he see the mamba?” Piet asked again.

“No,” Hendrik replied.

Hendrik had noticed that Piet refrained from mentioning the dead herdsman by name. Here was something inexplicable for
you, Hendrik reflected. As soon as a man died you were afraid to go on talking of him by name. It was a singular thing.

“Yes, they say it is very often the case,” Piet remarked. Hendrik started. But Piet's next words showed that he had not really broken in on Hendrik's thoughts. Still, it was disquieting.

“Yes,” Piet went on, “they say that very often when you get bitten by a mamba, you die without having seen the snake. The mamba just glides out of the grass behind you and is gone again before you quite know what has happened. The whole thing is so sudden.”

 

Hendrik did not answer. For some reason he did not want Piet to have the satisfaction of being told that his reconstruction of the incident was correct. Nevertheless, that was just how the thing had occurred. The herdsman was walking towards the wagon. He shouted something, not very loudly. And the next thing that Hendrik saw were brown coils vanishing into the grass with lightning movements, and the herdsman falling beside the wagon in a quivering heap. In his mind Hendrik could still see the glint of the sun on the sleek brown body of the snake.

“They also say – ” Piet Uys began again.

But Hendrik interrupted him.

He did not like the callous way in which Piet spoke about those things. Just as though it were an ordinary matter for a man to die like this, of snakebite, before their eyes, without his having had time, even, to make his peace with God. “You are older than I,
Oom Piet,” Hendrik said. “Will you pray?” By that time the body had been lowered into the earth.

The white men stood together on one side of the grave. The kaffirs crowded together in a bunch on the other side. They were all bareheaded. Piet Uys did not pray long.

“Amen,” Hendrik said when Piet had finished.

“Amen,” the kaffirs said after him, self-conscious on account of their unfamiliarity with the white man's burial rites. They were Bechuanas, and had a different way of disposing of the dead.

“Anyway, he was a good kaffir,” Piet Uys said, flinging a handful of earth into the grave, “we will sing a hymn for him, too. We will sing ‘Rust Myn Ziel'.”

Accordingly, the two white men sang a verse of this Dutch Reformed Church hymn, the kaffirs joining in as best they could.

Then the grave was covered up and the burial was over.

Hendrik van Jaarsveld was glad that the rainy season was approaching, bringing with it the prospect of the termination of the drought in Schweizer-Reneke. Then he could inspan his ox-wagon and trek home with his cattle. It was unnatural living alone like this in the bush with Piet Uys and the kaffirs. He wanted company.

It was very difficult having only one white man to talk to all the time, he decided. Especially when that man was Piet Uys. Piet said such stupid things, too. For instance, after the burial of the herdsman, he had said: “You know, Hendrik, they say that
lightning never strikes in the same place twice. Well, it's the same with a mamba. It never strikes twice in the same place, either.”

At this Piet had slapped Hendrik on the shoulder, expecting him to join in the joke – whatever it was.

“That's a good one, isn't it, Hendrik?” Piet said, “and I thought it out myself.”

“I hope we're back in Schweizer-Reneke before you think out the next one,” Hendrik answered; then, because Piet looked at him questioningly, he added quickly, “I mean, so that you will have more people to tell it to.”

“I see,” Piet answered, and turned away.

Since then their relations had been strained.

Piet had gone into the bush after game and Hendrik was glad to be alone. He sat on a fallen tree-trunk and gazed absently in the direction in which Piet had gone.

A rifle report rang out, echoing from krantz to krantz across the veld. Hendrik knew there would be no further shots. That was Piet Uys's way. He would go on patiently stalking a buck for hours on end, and he never fired until he was absolutely sure of his shot. It was Piet's boast that he always went with only one cartridge in his Mauser, and that he invariably brought back either a buck or the live cartridge.

From the distance of the report Hendrik worked it out that Piet would be back fairly soon. He didn't relish that very much. It was pleasant sitting alone in the sun, on a tree-trunk that had been hollowed out by the white ants.

Suddenly, as he pictured Piet bending over the buck, slashing away into the warm flesh with his hunting knife, Hendrik realised that he was again becoming subject to that sense of intimacy with dead things – the feeling that possessed him when he disembowelled the ribbok in the vlakte – the feeling that had come to him when he wrapped the dead herdsman in the blanket.

He was frightened.

He looked around. If only he could see a kaffir he would feel better. But he remembered that the kaffirs were all away with the cattle. He was shivering. The Marico was an unhealthy place to be in, he reflected. The sun and the stones and the thorn-trees. It was maddening. Nothing but thorn-trees and stones and the sun. It was a good country to come to once in a while. But you hadn't to stay long. And you must have company. You must have somebody with you who wasn't like Piet Uys.

He thought of Piet, walking through the bush, with a buck slung over his shoulder, every step bringing him nearer. Well, perhaps even Piet was better than this intense loneliness. He stared out into the bush. Piet wouldn't be long now.

But there was that buck that Piet would be carrying. Hendrik decided that he might even try to talk to Piet about this queer feeling that overtook him now and then. It was just possible that Piet might understand. He might even have had similar queer emotions about things.

Yes, when Piet came, he would talk to him about it.

Shortly afterwards Piet came. Hendrik saw him through the trees. He took off his hat and waved. Piet waved back. Suddenly Hendrik felt, darting through his left hand, a monstrous pain. He saw Piet fling down his rifle and the buck and come running up towards him. Then Hendrik slipped from the tree-trunk and, with his hand pressed tight under his armpit, rolled over and over in the grass.

He came to rest with his legs on an ant-hill and his head in a slight depression. It was a funny sort of way to lie, Hendrik thought. But what seemed stranger still, was that the pain, which for a while had swept through and through his whole body, had left him. He remembered thrusting his hand into his armpit. He would remove it and find out what caused the pain.

But he couldn't move his hand. That was queer. He wanted to sit up. He couldn't do that either.

“Piet,” he tried to call. But his lips remained motionless, and no sound came.

That was funny, Hendrik thought.

Then when Piet Uys approached and took off his hat very slowly, Hendrik van Jaarsveld understood.

“God, how terrible,” Piet Uys said, “and how easily it might have been me.”

In the heat of the midday – Oom Schalk Lourens said – Adriaan Naudé and I were glad to be resting there, shaded by the tall bluegums that stood in a clump by the side of the road.

I sat on the grass, with my head and shoulders supported against a large stone. Adriaan Naudé who had begun by leaning against a tree-trunk with his legs crossed and his fingers interlaced behind his head and his elbows out, lowered himself to the ground by degrees; for a short while he remained seated on his haunches; then he sighed and slid forward, very carefully, until he was lying stretched out at full length, with his face in the grass.

And all this while Adriaan Naudé was murmuring about how lazy kaffirs are, and about the fact that the kaffir Jonas should already have returned with the mule-cart, and about how, if you wanted a job done properly, you had to do it yourself. I agreed with Adriaan Naudé that Jonas had been away rather long with the mule-cart; he ought to be back quite soon, now, I said.

“The curse of the Transvaal,” Adriaan Naudé explained, stretching himself out further along the grass, and yawning, “the curse of the Transvaal is the indolence of the kaffirs.”

“Yes, Neef Adriaan,” I replied. “You are quite correct. It would perhaps have been better if one of us had gone along in the mule-cart with Jonas.”

“It's not so bad for you, Neef Schalk,” Adriaan Naudé went on, yawning again. “You have got a big comfortable stone to rest your head and shoulders against. Whereas I have got to lie flat down on the dry grass with all the sharp points sticking into me. You are always like that, Neef Schalk. You always pick the best for yourself.”

By the unreasonable nature of his remarks I could tell that Adriaan Naudé was being overtaken by a spell of drowsiness.

“You are always like that,” Adriaan went on. “It's one of the low traits of your character. Always picking the best for yourself. There was that time in Zeerust, for instance. People always mention that – when they want to talk about how low a man can be . . .”

I could see that the heat of the day and his condition of being half-asleep might lead Adriaan Naudé to say things that he would no doubt be sorry for afterwards. So I interrupted him, speaking very earnestly for his own good.