The Lost World of the Kalahari (17 page)

‘What are you all saying?' Spode now asked in French, his voice still gruff with sleep.

I told him at length. He listened without comment, his eyes sombre and without surprise of any kind.

When we went to the small radio station which daily linked Maun to the outside world for one hour, I sent a telegram, among others, to Molly and Cyril Challis in Francistown asking them to meet Stonehouse on his arrival and help him on his way home to Johannesburg. Jeremiah sent an expensive telegram to his wife and son reading: ‘I greet my son and you. We have arrived with God in health and safety at Maun and with God we go on today.' Ben telegraphed to his home for a forecast of rain. Vyan inquired after the health of his hump-backed cattle. Spode, though I knew it only months later, sent a telegram to our mutual friend to the effect: ‘I commit my child to your care stop fear I shall not come out of it alive.'

Simon Stonehouse did not want to send a telegram and lay in bed so disappointed that he barely said good-bye to me. Charles, too, had no message to send. Like a long distance runner with mind and breath only for the race, he spent the morning refuelling, oiling, greasing, and otherwise tending his beloved engines with such effect that soon after noon our Land-Rovers were humming along the track like bees with syrup hastening back to their hive.

N
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that the routine of camping was clearly established, we spent two whole days travelling until sundown. For the first day the new arrangement of Comfort helping Spode seemed to work miracles. But on the second there was a regression. Comfort came drifting back to my side and I had to give him the orders I imagined Spode would like instead of Spode himself taking control. Charles, however, to my delight distinguished himself by spotting long before any of the veterans, a twenty-foot python looking like a stocking filled for Christmas, dragging itself ponderously through the bush. Armed only with a stick he tried gallantly to head it off and turn it back towards Spode to film, but the serpent was not willing.

Soon after sunrise on the second day out from Maun I was startled to hear an outburst of rapid gunfire ahead of me. I came to Ben's Land-Rover abandoned in the track with three dead wild dogs lying close beside it. Some moments later Ben and John reappeared dragging two more dead dogs after them. It was an extraordinary demonstration of Ben's quick ractions and accuracy as a rifleman: five shots at five of the swiftest animals in Africa and all five fatal. Ben's sun-lined face had a benign expression on it. I believe of all natural things he hated only the wild dogs for their ruthless ways with weaker animals. He climbed back into his vehicle like a horseman swinging into his saddle, and we were off again.

Towards evening of the same day we reached a small rest camp, used by the recruiting organization of the Mines, called Sepopa: the place of the eddies. It was on the edge of the swamp about ninety miles by water below the entrance to the Okovango delta, and the terminal of a small ferry service run by the mines between south and north banks of the marshes. I knew that close by there lived the remnants of a race of dug-out or makorro men. As there was still an hour or two of daylight I went on alone to see if I could contact their headman, a veteran renowned for his travels by makorro and with the musical-sounding name of Karuso, as well as the honorary title among Africans of ‘King of Paddlers'. I did not find him. Instead I met a man, a home-made axe upon his shoulders, walking out of the bush into a long savannah of buffalo grass restless under the tuneful air of evening. He reminded me of a city dweller, umbrella in hand, out for a stroll in the park after a day in the office. To my amazement he knew me at once, said that the ‘big master from Muhembo' had been there the day before to see Karuso, and that already dug-outs and paddlers, of whom he was going to be one, were standing by down-river.

I slept the better for the axe-man's news and had, that night, an especially vivid dream. I was in the centre of a great swamp. The sun was setting. Between me and the red of evening rose an enormous tree with a smooth straight trunk rising some hundreds of feet and with its branches and leaves filling much of the sky. In the dream I recognized it as the final object of my search.

Next morning I rose early to tell the others I was leaving them to rest at Sepopa and going on alone to Muhembo. I asked Spode to select only what films he would need in the swamp and took the rest to store in Muhembo. Though there were only two European couples and three bachelors in Muhembo it was a transit depot of great importance to the mines. From all over the roadless country beyond in northern South-West Africa and Angola, year in, year out, sturdy black men made their way towards Muhembo on foot through bush and swamp to apply for work in the mines. I had known it years before, when the men were taken in trucks nine hundred miles or so over the wasteland to the railway of Francistown. But now, whenever their numbers justified it, they were collected by aircraft and flown in a few hours over a distance that had previously taken weeks.

Both the two lone Europeans who administered the depôt were at the airstrip when I arrived. Most of the African population of the village was there too. As always there were many women and children because the able-bodied men were away earning money to pay taxes and buy food. They were an attractive people. They had smooth, shining black skins with a gleam of raven's wing in the sun on their broad shoulders and long supple legs. The short peppercorn hair of the women was made longer by plaits of fine, black fibre, skilfully woven into it and falling in straight strands to their smooth shoulders. They were naked to the waist and their firm breasts fully exposed. Round their stomachs they wore a kilt made of plaited fibre and beads drawn into patterns of shining black and white. Their faces were illuminated with the feeling that accompanied their animated talk. Their voices were low and when one caught a dark eye it looked at one instantly not as a stranger but as a woman, before the frankness of its own gaze made it shy and a head was quickly turned away. They looked, indeed, more like one of the Libyan tribes vivid in the gossip of Herodotus than a crowd assembled to greet an aeroplane. Yet there they were hemming in the airstrip and their numbers growing as eager new arrivals emerged from the end of a red footpath on the edge of the flaming bush. In the centre of the crowd were two lone European topees, like lobster pots adrift on a dark sea. Their owners, however, I found, were anchored and at home, ready in exchange of wit and good humour with the crowd.

‘They love this moment,' the senior of the two told me. ‘They even know something about flying that we don't! It's humiliating but true. They stand there and can tell from the way the plane approaches which pilot is flying it! You'll hear them say: “Oh, that's the bald-headed one coming today,” or “That's the one with the fire on his head”, “Hippobelly”, “Red-nose”, “Shining face”, “A new one” and heaven knows what! But you can be sure they'll be right.'

When the aircraft had come and gone we went to this official's house on the river, where we sat on the veranda among a vast though oddly-ordered chaos of books, magazines, fishing-rods, spoons and flies, and all the paraphernalia that had helped him travel the long years, alone, without injury to his spirit. Almost at our feet, the great Okovango river broke into splinters on the pointed papyrus mat at the door of the swamps. Beyond the green of the marshes the bush of the Northern Kalahari sandveld burned like coal in the fire of the day, which we saw as though through a sheet of Venetian glass, glowing because of the essence of silver water feverishly extracted by the sun.

‘It's beginning to get hot early this year,' my host said with a suspicion of foreboding in his voice all the more alarming considering the many seasons he had seen coming and going in that place. ‘But, first, let me tell you what I've done for you.'

He had been to see Karuso and provisionally engaged dugouts and paddlers. They were standing by at a place called Ikwagga just below Sepopa. He had left me to settle the terms but they would take me where I wanted to go if the state of water permitted. But the funny thing was, already they had seemed to know where I was going. They were convinced I was looking for the unknown tree in the swamps. ‘Good Heavens!' I exclaimed, remembering my dream of the night before. ‘Why a tree?'

He explained that deep in the swamps there was an enormous tree, unlike any other tree in the rest of the country. It had as yet no name nor was it known to what species it belonged, but it was called ‘the unknown tree' by all.

‘Well, I've not come for that!' I laughed.

He nodded and said I could work that one out with Karuso. What really concerned him was my intention to travel so far by dug-out at that time of the year. He begged me not to do so. The swamp was alive with crocodile and hippo. Every year the hippo were more and more aggressive because they had been hunted constantly and badly. Man was now taken, on sight, as an enemy. Only three weeks before, just where the river bent like a cutlass of stainless steel, a hippo had upset a makorro and bitten a man in half. A week before a boy had lost a leg in the same way. So it went on. He asked why not compromise? He had a launch built with timbers stout enough to resist any attack by hippo. It had a small ferry service to run once a week, but he was willing to let me have it for cost price working between schedules. He suggested I should take it as far as the water allowed and then use makorros. ‘In the shallows you'll have a chance,' he concluded, ‘but in the deeper channels I wouldn't put a penny of my money on you.'

He then called in his colleague and for some hours the two of them told me all they could about the swamp. I owe much to what they told me of their unique experience. When I left ‘The Place of the Eddies' I carried written instructions to the ferryman to place himself under my orders.

The next day we sailed in the launch soon after sunrise. John and Cheruyiot, whom we had left behind with our Land-Rovers and main baggage, waved to us sadly because they too longed to come. Soon the main stream carried us away from the bushveld banks and into long, deep channels between tall papyrus growth. The smooth, cool, effortless passage over even water after days of hot dusty bumping and bucking eased our troubled senses. Everyone was in a good humour and instantly nicknamed the solemn skipper and his lively engineman ‘Grumpy' and ‘Shorty' respectively. Every now and then, away to the south, some high thrust of green over the roof of river forest rose like an explosion of cumulus, uncurling in the dynamic blue. Occasionally the dead stump of a gigantic tree stood out, bare, above the papyrus and reeds bent double with birds, like some bone of pre-Okovango history, and inevitably it wore a gleaming fish-eagle on its top. Giant herons, crested water-birds, hammerheads, kingfishers, crimson bee-eaters, the royal Barotse egrets, and sometimes even sky blue African rollers rose everywhere out of the resounding reeds. Each bay cut in a cliff of green was ardent with white and blue lilies' hearts, open with abandon to bumble and sun. From one lily leaf to another, lying flat on the surface raced long-legged trotter birds, a silver dust of water at the heels, to cut off translucent insects from refuge in the papyrus shadows. All the time, above the chug-chug of our small engine, the air was loud with the nostalgic call of bird and water-fowl. The sandy spits in the deeper bays were compact with streamlined crocodile. They lay on the sands, eyes shut with delight, mouths wide open while adroit little birds picked their ivory teeth clean of meat. ‘Shorty', who clearly hated them, begged us to shoot. But we refused. All we shot for dinner were some duck, when they rose like stars from some exclusive water.

Spode without prompting got out his film camera. As I watched him I found my heart beating somewhat faster. It was no longer any use glossing over our present lack of progress with hopes for the future. This journey into the swamp was the final test in an increasingly grave situation for both him and me. As yet we had done scarcely any filming. If he now found nothing worth-while to film it would be a crisis without imaginable end.

I had hardly posed the question to myself when I saw Spode putting away his camera.

‘I can't work. The engine vibrates too much,' he turned to me.

‘Whenever you want to film we'll stop the engine and drift. Just give me the sign,' I offered.

‘Tomorrow,' he answered curtly. ‘There's nothing much anyway to film here.”

About eleven the channel brought us once more to the edge of the bush on the southern bank of the swamp. The makorro people, who had heard the launch an hour before it appeared, were assembled sitting silently in the shade of a great tree on the tiny cape of earth forming the little bay called Ikwagga. There was no hut or kraal to be seen through the bush or grass; only this group of men gravely observing the launch manoeuvring closer and making no sign of greeting or offer of help. It made an odd impression. Most people I know in that part of the world are friendly and demonstrative. These men were neither; not hostile, just withheld and profoundly reserved. Their faces, too, were strangely uneven as if each one belonged to a different race from which he had been torn by a violent fate to be arbitrarily attached to this patchwork assembly before us. Later I understood they had all come together in the swamps not by choice but when escaping destruction by the Matabele in the time of Africa's great troubles in the past. All I knew at that moment, however, was that I did not really like the look of them. There were several faces that interested me, as for instance the axeman of my previous meeting. When I caught his eye he did smile and lift a hand to point me out to someone beside him. That person immediately rose. He was tall and finely made. Leaning on a punting pole he looked at me intently out of keen brown eyes, a look of great experience. He was in rags put on out of respect for us, but he wore them with unragged elegance if not a certain innate swagger. On his head was a Boer War scout's khaki hat, with remodelled brim and a string of beads around the crown. As the launch grounded he doffed it, to show a head of grey hair. Obviously he stood ready to speak for them all.