The Lost World of the Kalahari (16 page)

‘Sometimes, Eugene, I'm not so sure of that,' I said, saying, I believe, the only sharp thing I ever did on the journey.

Taken aback for one moment he glared at me. For a moment I thought he would hit me. Instead he shook a clenched fist and demanded to be sent back to Europe at once.

‘You've contracted to do a film with me,' I told him firmly. ‘And I'll release you from your pledge when you've done it. We've done little enough work so far. I think you're just tired out. You'll feel better after tea. Ask Jeremiah for a lemon and squeeze that into your water if you don't like the taste.'

‘A lemon, bah!' He made a mouth of disgust at what, for the rest of us, was a luxury and stumped off irately to his vehicle.

After drinks at sundown, however, he drew me on one side and apologized handsomely. The real trouble he explained was that he could not get on with Simon Stonehouse. He was really no use to him and he would rather go on alone, doing all the work himself, than have an unwilling helper. I told Spode I thought they were both tired and not yet acclimatized. I asked him to try out the situation a bit longer. I did not labour the obvious point, that we were nearly a week's hard travelling from the nearest railway and could not possibly exchange personnel. He seemed content with that and assured me he was more determined than ever to make our film. In the meanwhile, I had heard another version of the situation from Stonehouse, who was making me increasingly anxious. I had never known a more willing person and as I watched his drawn face closely in the firelight that evening, I told myself that if it were purely a question of physical strain he could learn in time to endure it. But I was not so certain that he could support as well the strain of working under someone so different as Spode. His open young face looked to me almost tragic with two kinds of fatigue.

For once the charm of hot food, a night of stars, and the prospect of sleep in the singing bush failed to cheer me. The doubts which had been in my own mind since Bulawayo had been emphasized by Spode's scene in the afternoon. It seemed to me that everyone round me, Vyan, Hatherall, and Charles, Cheruyiot and Jeremiah, was now busy reinterpreting our situation with new insight. Comfort, who had understood more than most, was particularly uneasy that evening. He kept on getting up from the fire and standing and listening intently on the edge of the firelight.

‘What's the matter, Comfort?' I asked at last joining him there.

‘Don't know, sir,' he said turning round, the firelight warm in his shrewd disciplined eyes. ‘Don't know. There's plenty of lion about, I think, and strange people out there and . . . But I don't really know, sir.'

It was certainly odd that we had gone hundreds of miles without hearing a lion. As Vyan remarked later: ‘The silent ones are the dangerous ones. I certainly like mine to roar at night.' But there was more to it than that, as Comfort knew.

Before it was fully light Comfort left camp with a gun in the crook of his arm. He was back at sunrise leading an old man armed with one of the carbines that had caused the Indian Mutiny, and accompanied by a little boy. The old man trembled with fever, his cheeks were hollow, his eyes dull with the drowsiness that precedes the final sleep of the sickness carried by the fly. Yet he was hungry and we fed both well.

While feeding, the old man told us that neither lion nor water had ever been so plentiful. Everywhere the water between the Chobe and Okovango stood in one continuous and expanding sheet. There was, he assured us, no hope of getting through to the west, and no Bushman on our side of the swamps. In fact he had not seen one for many years. His own hut was the only one in a distance of four days' walking, and he lived there alone with his ancient gun to feed his women and children.

It was by then eight o'clock on Sunday morning and immediately after filming, which Spode did willingly and well, I called them all together and said: ‘I'm afraid it's no use going on trying to get through the floods on this side. We'll call it off and see if we can't take the water in the rear. We'll make for Harry Riley's old track to Maun, and go the six hundred miles round the marshes to Old Muhembo on the Okovango, at the sluice way to the swamps. We'll leave our Land-Rovers there, get a boat or dug-outs if necessary, and break into the swamp that way. If the water is still high enough we might even go through the centre on the current for the whole of the four hundred miles to Maun. If there are any River Bushman left that's where we'll find them.'

After breakfast we picked up the rut Harry Riley, many years before, had opened up between the Zambesi and Maun. Our Land-Rovers sped along it, once more making that musical sound I love so well when they travel fast. The only real discomfort was caused by the tsetse fly. They settled on our vehicles in such dense masses that the metal bonnets looked as if covered with calico and I could hardly see through the windscreen. We had to keep our windows firmly shut and that of course made it very hot. I stopped only once to try and get Spode to film the tsetse fly.

He asked: ‘Will there be another occasion later on?'

‘There may be,' I said. ‘Though I doubt if so impressive a one.'

‘Later!' he muttered firmly, quickly shutting the window of his car against the hungry fly.

Soon we struck the first of the Batawana settlements that crowd the edges of the stream and swamps round the small administrative settlement of Maun. Just before we reached the rough home-made causeway of Mopani timbers and stone thrown across the water to the village, a tall European came running out from behind a neat Batawana hut to stand beside a pile of kit and a pair of guns on the edge of the track. When he saw us it was clear we were not what he was expecting for listlessly he waved us on. But there was time enough on that Sunday, between the swamp and the desert, for us to catch the glimpse of night in his eyes.

‘Good God, Laurens!' Vyan exclaimed involuntarily as we drove by. ‘What was the matter with that fellow? Did you see the look on his face?'

‘Yes,' I answered, thinking it was exactly the look I had seen on the condemned Bushman's face at the other end of the journey. Suddenly the darkness seemed to link all together. ‘Shall we stop?'

‘No!' Vyan said, looking out. ‘It's no good. He's waving the others on as well.'

I thought no more of it for the moment because we were approaching Maun, and I was wishing, for the sake of the others, that they could have seen the place as I first saw it years before, after days of weary travelling across the long miles of empty waterless country between it and the Great North Road. Then the wide river of water, the lily-covered creeks, banks of green grass, and spreading acacia, flamboyant, and other trees, took on in ones' travel-stained senses the wonder of a dream oasis fulfilled. I remembered the welcome Harry Riley had given me in his remarkable little hotel which he had founded for the odd, intrepid traveller who had been determined enough to cross the desert, as well as for the score or so of Europeans patient and courageous enough to make Maun the unique outpost of life that it is today. The settlement lay there in the overwhelming sun of noon-day, a fortress of green with a moat of blue Okovango water around it keeping out the great grey Kalahari wasteland.

‘You know, Wyndham,' I told him, ‘the first night I ever spent in Maun, Harry and his friends gave a dance. We danced barefoot on the deep grass to the music of concertina, banjo, and guitar, our feet wet with dew and the lions roaring back at us down-river.'

‘I can't imagine the place without Harry,' Vyan said quietly, for he too had known him.

We made directly for the little hotel, where Harry's nephew and widow prepared lunch for us. While the others waited to eat I went to confirm that the petrol and stores, ordered many months before, were there. Then I called on the D.C. and his wife, both old friends. He was about to go fishing with his family but they delayed their departure to organize baths for us, and allot us a camping site under a tree at the bottom of his garden by the river. I visited the representative of the mines I have mentioned, also a friend. He was listening to a gramophone record of Tchaikovsky's ‘Nutcracker' music when I arrived. We sat on the veranda of his house in the cool, discussing my plan at length.

‘Of course we can help,' he said simply, and got up instantly to send a colleague in Muhembo a request by radio telephone (the only means of immediate communication between Maun and it) to organize a boat, or dug-outs and paddlers, for a journey into the swamp.

I got back to the hotel just as the others were finishing a lunch of yellow Okovango bream, duck, and lager beer. At that moment, also, the door on the mosquito-proof veranda opened and slammed sharply. The tall European we had seen on the road walked in, sat down silently in a wicker chair, giving us again just one dark unseeing look. For the moment I had the impulse to ask him to join us in a drink, but I was in a hurry and felt already somewhat overburdened. The impulse passed. Without bothering about food I took the others to pitch camp. While we were doing so, Simon Stonehouse suddenly began swaying on his feet. I ran to him and led him away, making him lie down in the shade of the tree. One moment he was white, then deeply flushed in the face. His pulse was racing. As soon as the camp was made, I took him to the hotel and asked for a spare bed for him. In the evening when all was finally organized I went and sat by him and we had a long talk.

I explained that what we had been through was child's play compared to what was to come. For some days already I had been afraid that without a long period of conditioning the kind of journey we were making would be too much for him. The temperature and collapse that afternoon showed how justified those fears had been. I wanted him to know, therefore, that I was not going to take him on with us, but was arranging for him to be flown out to the railway at Francistown by one of the aeroplanes of the mines as soon as he was better.

I did not tell him Spode had already suggested his going, nor did I say I could imagine nothing more unfair to an impressionable boy than being made to endure in conditions of severe physical strain, a conflict of loyalties between Spode, who had invited him, and the leader of the expedition, who engaged him. I told him also, because I thought uncertainty was bad for him, that the decision was final.

I then went and told Spode what I had done, saying I proposed asking the head of police if Comfort, who was supposed to turn back at Maun, could continue with us. I suggested that as he spoke French he should be attached to Spode as his full-time assistant. Spode appeared delighted with the arrangement. In camp that night he was once again his charming continental self.

I was hardly asleep when the noise of someone running towards the camp woke me. It was Stonehouse in pyjamas and boots. He seized me by the shoulders saying wildly: ‘What am I doing in the hotel? Why am I not here? How did I get there?'

‘I took you there this afternoon. Don't you remember?' I answered.

‘No, I don't . . . What's happening to me?'

‘I'll tell you in the morning.'

With great difficulty I persuaded him to go back to bed. I was about to sleep again when the sound of a truck, approaching at high speed, startled me. Its lights flashed wildly above the bush and water. Brakes screaming, it stopped abruptly at the D.C.'s house. In a few minutes it was off again and vanished, travelling fast. Somehow it brought an element of hysterical alarm into the atmosphere of the night and became quickly associated in my mind with the more negative forces which seemed to beset us. I had done all I could to beat off shadows, yet a sense of subtle disintegration, working against the purposeful composition of our party, persisted. I have had many difficulties on other expeditions in Africa and the East. I had expected difficulty and disappointment on this journey too, but nothing so elusive as this. I lay there for long, watching our fire die down, and the darkness beyond seemed to me as charged with negation as one of those firelight pictures of Goya crowded with nightmare shapes.

In the morning when I met the D.C. on my way to his bathroom he seemed abnormally tired. ‘Sorry,' he yawned. ‘Had a bad night. Fellow committed suicide.'

Instantly I remembered the truck in the night. And as instantly I knew who was the victim. To an amazed D.C. I described the tall European we had passed on the way.

‘That's the man,' he nodded. ‘Poor fellow, he had put a black woman in the family way. We thought it was best to send a police truck for him yesterday to get him to go back to his own people. But he didn't want to go.'

When I told the others about it at breakfast Vyan became immensely angry: ‘There's a pretty comment', he said, ‘on your European civilization. A man has to commit suicide because he's done the most natural thing in the world. And what could be more natural than that a young man in his loneliness – and, my God, how lonely it can be for them in places like this! – should go with one of these black women? But the end has to be suicide. I believe “suicide” is written in capital letters over all your European culture, in Africa and everywhere else.'

‘What worries me', I told him, ‘is my end of it. I've a feeling we might have prevented it.'

I told him of my impulse to ask the man to join us in a drink, and my belief that such a gesture, slight as it was, might have turned the tide in him, breaking the sense of isolation imposed upon him by his official excommunication from European society and his own civilized conscience.

‘Perhaps,' Vyan answered. ‘But, dammit, Laurens, one'd go mad if one carried one's sense of responsibility to such lengths!'

‘When one's aware of these things perhaps one's mad not to,' I replied. And to this day the question persists. All I suspect is that the fear that drove the Bushman to ritual murder, and this poor lonely boy caught between the swamp and the desert to suicide, together with the forces of law and order that condemn them both, are all part of the rejection and subsequent inhumanity of the slanted modern mind. And on this particular occasion I feared, beyond explanation, that the coincidence of these events with our own movements could not have been so precise unless we were, unwittingly, off the beat of some mean of time in our own spirits.