The Lost World of the Kalahari (15 page)

I had him next to me in my Land-Rover for the rest of the day. We moved up again to the head of the line as I had been warned that the next fifty miles were extremely dangerous because great herds of elephant were wandering between the waterless bush and river. As always the responsibility of young calves had set on edge the nerves of cows and bulls. Comfort told me of several recent exceedingly uncomfortable meetings with herds. One old bull, already so notorious that he had been christened ‘Old Sway Back' because of the violent manner in which he came out on any scent that perturbed him, some days before had forced the police jeep to retreat precipitately in reverse for close on a mile. The track for nearly fifty miles was a continuous series of elephant spoor deep in the sand. Elephant dung everywhere lay still warm and steaming in the grass. The going was made rough and difficult for the leading vehicle by elephant potholes. But just before sundown when we climbed out of the sandy depression in the river basin to camp on a rise overlooking the Chobe the heavy spoor diminished suddenly and fell away abruptly behind us. We thought we were clear of that particular hazard, but we thought too soon.

At two o'clock in the morning in my deepest sleep an alarming noise reached me. It was already over when I woke but it lingered in my memory like the echo of a gunshot. I listened and looked. The fire had died down to a great coal pinned like a crimson rose to the dark earth. Everyone was fast asleep. Had I been mistaken? No! There was something moving with a heavy, sagging stealth just beyond the fire. I threw my mosquito net aside and leapt to the fire calling on Jeremiah to wake up as I threw fresh wood on it. Jeremiah huffed and puffed air into the coals like Aeolus blowing up a gale, and the fire flared up quickly. The bush immediately began to heave and crackle and the regiment of elephant which encircled us quickly retreated into the night. At sunrise we found one elephant spoor satin in the sand only ten yards from the fire and close-by was the broken branch of dead wood on which he had trodden and woken me from my sleep.

The day, however, brought shocks of a different and more lasting kind. We were entering great baobab-tree country. These fantastic trees had already stirred Spode's imagination in a manner which looked as if it might really become productive. One of my favourite Bushman stories declared that these trees were planted upside down by a mischievous member of ‘the persons of the early race'. Livingstone, who could be as prosaic in words as he was imaginative in deed, said they looked like carrots put in the earth the wrong end up. They are unlike any other tree, looking more like a product of fever and sunstroke than a normal botanical concept. Even the bark of the baobab is flushed and hot. Its varicose veins, full of permanganate sap, show up on the surface swollen and clotted with the malaise of its birth. For all its immense girth and appearance of strength, it is hollow inside. On this hot morning stripped of leaves and tartar fruit they stood out beside our route with their swollen apoplectic columns like the arms of a brood of Titans buried alive, wide open hands protruding from the grave and vainly appealing to the stark blue sky now filled with vultures. The botanist, too, has caught the image of these contorted fingers and called the species
Andisonia Digitata
.

Spode took eagerly to the suggestion of filming these trees and I, determined to follow to the end any hint of the creative in him, set everyone to help. For some hours we filmed baobabs both singly and in flushed battalions, from afar and from close-up, finishing with a great-grandfather of a tree by the edge of the Chobe river at a place where both Livingstone and Selous the hunter of Africa are said to have camped.

It was there that I realized suddenly that all was not well between Spode and Stonehouse. Stonehouse had worked hard. He had driven a vehicle for the whole of two difficult days and not shirked a duty in camp. But already I had the impression that he was unduly tired for one so young and strong. I noticed that the night had not really rested him. He was slower than usual in his responses. Spode who had done little except his camera work seemed to take Stonehouse's fatigue as a personal offence. He became so irritable that in the end I asked Vyan to drive his Land-Rover for him, and took Stonehouse in with me and Comfort for rest. I feared now that it was not just physical exertion but mental conflict that had helped to exhaust Stonehouse.

The second shock came just beyond a small African outpost on the edge of the sleeping sickness country of Northern Bechuanaland. My plan had been, first, to see if there were any remnants left of the fabulous River branch of the Bushman race. That was the main reason why I had begun the journey on the northern frontier of the Kalahari. If there were one place left in Africa with enough water and isolation to have enabled the River Bushman to maintain himself intact, I felt it could only be deep in the land which lay behind the dense sleeping-sickness barrier and waters of this vast swamp made by the rivers flowing down from their source in the highlands of Angola to spread out and vanish in the sand and sun of the Northern Kalahari. While the growing heat of summer was purifying the central desert of foreign invaders I thought I could, without loss of time, explore those enigmatic northern marches. My intention was to begin the task by cutting in between the Chobe river and the great Okovango swamp and to probe all along the edges of the marshes for signs of the River Bushman.

But here, just beyond the discreet huts of reeds and grass where I had proposed swinging away to the north-west we found our route blocked by vast sheets of flood water. I knew that the flood in the swamps had been abnormal. An old friend who had helped me to plan this part of the journey, the valiant Harry Riley of Maun, had been drowned in them some months before. I had expected, however, that the worst of the flood water would have subsided by now. Yet here the floods were decisively blocking our route.

We had no option but to feel our way far round the water to the east, and to climb out of the lapping basin on to the high bush-covered dunes that flanked it. It was hot, tough, and in many ways nerve-racking driving. We had to use our Land-Rovers like tanks and crash our way blindly through bush and undergrowth of tangled, spurred, and spiked thorn trees. The sand beneath us was deep and fine enough for an hour-glass. We had continually to use the four-wheel drive of the Land-Rovers in the lowest gears. Time after time the wind-screen and windows of my own Land-Rover were so deep in leaves and branches, brushing like angry sea-green water over them, that I could not see what lay beyond. The vehicle shook and was submerged like a vessel shipping wave after wave of tumultuous ocean to its funnel-tops. Twisting and turning to avoid only the trunks of adult trees we crashed our way through, like this, for hours. I thought it dramatic enough to justify a picture but Spode when I suggested it said: ‘I'm sorry, I have not the strength . . . later.'

The sun was low when at last we came down the side of the dunes on to a level plain covered with Mapani trees. They are always a brave sight. I know of no tree which partakes so deeply of the nature of Africa, and is so identified with its indomitable spirit of renewal. All the year round they are green, red, and gold, and though the bark of the long slender trunks is twisted with the struggle to break out of tortured earth they mount undismayed, in an upright spiral, into the rain-less blue. There the dying leaf, the new-born bud, and the green, expanding butterfly-wing of the adolescent hang side by side to give great, silent, and forgotten plains the look of early autumn. Now when we camped among them the last of the sunlight was dripping like honey from their leaves and barley-sugar stems. The night, however, was not silent. From sunset to dawn the croaking of frogs to the west warned us that the waters from the overflowing marshes were still near.

As a result the next day we held on south until we came to the first of the blue Shinamba Hills. I have always longed to climb them. No white person, I believe, has yet done so. But regretfully I felt compelled to swerve smartly around them and leave them like a puff of smoke above the flickering flame of the burning, northern waterless plains.

Just beyond the hills, the plain levelled. Three amazed giraffes in Harlequin silk watched us go by, and suddenly far below we saw vast herds of game grazing up to their chins in the grass between the sparkling Mopani forests and the pink and mauve mists drawn up, steaming, from the molten marshes. The animals shone and glittered as if their colours were newly painted, and every now and then a group of youngsters broke from the herd to dance a provocative ballet of sheer fire above the yellow grass.

Vyan and Hatherall climbed on to the roof of their vehicle to watch. Jeremiah, John, Cheruyiot, and Stonehouse excitedly followed their example. Only Spode, tired and depressed, leaned against the door of his vehicle.

‘By Jove, Ben!' I heard Vyan said. ‘It's unbelievable! They're there in thousands! Zebra, wildebeest, roan, sable, giraffe, tssessebe, and hartebeest!'

Some twelve miles further on, just within the outskirts of another colourful Mopani forest, we found two round pans, side by side, and full to the brim with water. It was only eleven in the morning but the look of strain on the faces of Spode and Stonehouse decided me. Perhaps I had been going too fast and too hard for them. Perhaps the fault lay there. I must give them time to get acclimatized.

‘We'll camp here for a day or two and scout around at leisure to see what this part of the country can produce,' I told them all.

The relief on their faces seemed to prove the wisdom of the decision, and even Vyan and Hatherall seemed pleased.

We unloaded our vehicles so that we could re-pack with the benefit of the experience gained. We built an ideal camp. Vyan and Hatherall went out to hunt for food and came back in the early afternoon with a purple hartebeest slung over the bonnet of a Land-Rover, saying: ‘There's enough to feed an army out there.'

Part of the hartebeest we stacked in the fork of a tree nearby as bait for lion or leopard in the hope, after dark, of filming them and recording their table-talk. I myself went out later taking Stonehouse with me. The Mopani forest and clearings were scribbled bright with the colour of zebra, roan, and kudu. I came back in the evening to see Spode preparing flares and microphones for work in the dark around the camp. Already the rest seemed to have done him good and we sat down to a cheerful dinner of pot-roasted steak and liver of hartebeest. We went early to bed with crickets, owls, and frogs singing us to sleep. Only the lion, no doubt too easily fed with so much game about, did not come to try our bait. Instead, at midnight, a fearful hyaena crept into camp to taste it. The sight of the coals of our fire, however, sent him howling with dismay back into the night.

Early the next morning we tried another probe into the country to the west. We made straight for the great depression which lies between the marshes of the Chobe and Okovango. Ben was leading, and had just broken out of the Mopani forest to enter the yellow grass and black-thorn tree veld at the beginning of the long declivity, when he suddenly stopped. Our Land-Rovers were already black with the tsetse fly, bearers of sleeping sickness, pricking whatever was bare flesh with quick rapier thrusts. Ben himself, slapping his arms and neck continuously, was kneeling in the grass and pointing. Almost against the front wheels of his vehicle was the gleam of a line of jade-black water advancing slyly through the tangled turf and thorn. The day was hot and cloudless. For months the days had been bright and dry, yet, uncannily it seemed, there was water rising inexorably at his feet.

‘September and the flood waters still rising!' he exclaimed. ‘I bet it's centuries since it got as far as this. Nor would I have believed that tsetse fly would come out so deeply into the plain.'

We were forced to turn round and soon were back at our camp by the waters among the Mopani trees for another easy day and early night.

The following day we made a further determined attempt to outflank the rising water by a wide turning movement first east, then south and finally towards evening, west. We did long miles driving through deep sand the colour and texture of powdered Parisian rouge. The work of breaking through both it and the bush, simultaneously, was so hard that I constantly changed the leading vehicle. We broke through in the end without delay or mishap, but the hard labour of the engines, the heat and dust of the day, the constant bumping and rocking up and down, added much to the strain of another long lap in the journey. When once more at sundown we found our way blocked by impassive waters, the sense of frustration was more than some of us could bear.

I had gone ahead to pick a site for a camp on ground as high as possible above the water. It was a lovely situation in the open between immense black-thorn trees, with water for cooking and wood for fire near at hand. Only it was over-populated with tsetse fly. The first outcry came when the fly started stinging us immediately we began pitching camp. I pointed out that the fly would go the moment the sun went down and the complaining ceased. At that moment, however, Spode and Stonehouse, who had taken my place at the tail, drove into the clearing. The Land-Rover had hardly stopped when Spode flung himself out of it and came running towards me with a canvas water-bag in his hand.

‘What's the meaning of this,' he shouted, shaking the bag. ‘What d'you mean by giving me such filthy water to drink?'

‘What's the matter with it?' I asked keeping my voice low, but aware that everyone had stopped to listen though none, except Comfort, understood French. ‘It was boiled last night. I saw to it myself.'

‘It's foul to taste and I'll not put up with it any longer!'

‘I'm afraid you'll have to drink worse before we're through,' I told him.

‘Stop speaking to me as if I'm a child,' he cried out more angry than ever. ‘I'll have you know I'm not a child.'