The Lost World of the Kalahari (21 page)

For the second time my companions vanished. Then the buffalo abruptly swerved aside, and charged by me so close that his smell, the lost smell of the devout animal age before man, went acid in my nose.

I stood there watching him vanish like a man seeing his manhood in the field die down before him, thinking: ‘Only one thing saved me. I was not afraid. Because of that I belonged to them and the overall purpose of the day. In their magnetic deeps they knew it. But afraid, no gun or friend on earth could have saved me.'

I came to, trembling all over with the fear of what would have happened if I had been afraid, to hear the guide, sufficiently relieved to find himself alive to be mockingly reproachful of me, saying: ‘There was meat there you know, Master, for many days.' His voice sounded as if he were far away and not rising out of the grass near me. I gave no answer but walked over to where the others were uttering cries of astonishment over the spoor of the lone bull.

‘Look!' Comfort exclaimed, pointing to the puncture in the clay behind each of the rear hoof-prints. ‘Look how deep his after-claws have pierced the clay!'

The buffalo, once he has stunned his enemies with head and horn, likes to give them the
coup de grâce
with the pointed dagger he carries in a leather sheath at the heels of his hind legs. But none of us had ever seen after-claws so long as these.

‘Auck!' Long-axe said, shaking his head and his voice gentle as a woman's with wonder. ‘He must be the Chief of their Chiefs!'

But Samutchoso was looking more at me, not the spoor. In the same tone of awe that he had used the evening before when I shot the lechwe, he said quietly, certain of his meaning: ‘He knew you, Master. He recognized you and knowing you turned aside.'

After that we tried to rest in the nearest shadows but the shade-loving tsetse fly soon drove us out to seek relief in the hot sun. I made no attempt to hunt because I was certain the alarm raised by the buffalo would have stampeded the game for many miles around. In fact we were hardly back in the open when a baboon, now thoroughly on the alert, spotted us and broadcast a loud warning to the bush below him. Instead we did a complete circuit of the island to look for signs of human occupation. We found none except, well above flood-water level, the remains of three ancient makorros, unlike our paddlers' of flat-bottomed design, slowly rotted and rotting in the grass.

‘Massarwa! Bushmen!' Samutchoso, who seemed more aware of my main purpose than the others, explained unbidden as he came to stand sharing my absorption beside me.

All this time I noticed that the nerves of my companions had been sorely tried by the encounter with the buffalo. Whenever a baboon frantically rattled a palm in the silence, or a foraging party of indefatigable termites dropped a dry limb from a dead tree to crash in the bush below, they started violently and appeared ready to run. They followed me into the dark main wood with reluctance, and sought the daylight beyond with the eagerness of a vivid apprehension. Their relief when we rounded the circle where we had left the makorros among the motionless rushes, and started back for camp, made them chant with joy as they bent down to take up their paddles. However, I lay on my back in the bottom of the craft, looking deeply up into the blue channel of the sky framed between the trembling reed tips above me, with my heart and mind still so much in the scene with the buffalo that I had no room even for the negative answer implicit in the rotting Bushman dug-outs on the island. I felt that the encounter had for a moment made me immediate, and had, all too briefly, closed a dark time-gap in myself. With our twentieth-century selves we have forgotten the importance of being truly and openly primitive. We have forgotten the art of our legitimate beginnings. We no longer know how to close the gap between the far past and the immediate present in ourselves. We need primitive nature, the First Man in ourselves, it seems, as the lungs need air and the body food and water; yet we can only achieve it by a slinking often shameful, back-door entrance. I thought finally that of all the nostalgias that haunt the human heart the greatest of them all, for me, is an everlasting longing to bring what is youngest home to what is oldest, in us all.

I was lifted out of this mood by the sight of an aeroplane coming down the centre of the blue channel above me like a translucent insect about to be burned in the yellow lamp of the sun. I was told by the pilot later that it was full of primitive black people on their way from Muhembo to the distant gold mines. Far down on the swamp we moved in the slow, ancient way. But above, with the blazing afternoon water hurling long spears of copper and bronze light at their eyes, the black travellers sang incessantly, for reassurance, the one hymn, ‘Abide with me', which the missionary priests, the medicine men of the peoples who built the magic plane, had taught them. They sang it so loudly that the pilot heard it above the noise in his cockpit. But from where I lay I heard only the engines droning discordantly among sounds dedicated to a world before and beyond us all.

So we came home in the evening, the smoke of our camp-fires blue among the lofty tree-tops. Since morning two vultures had taken up their position on the summits of two of the highest of them. They were starkly outlined against the red of the sunset and made an ominous impression. The moment we walked into the camp I knew it was more than an impression. Coming back content and still somewhat exalted by all that had happened in a long and exacting day, I did not know at first what had happened. The paddlers, with few exceptions, were huddled round their fires cooking the remains of my lechwe and when they saw we brought no meat looked up to give us no greeting but only a long sullen stare. Both Charles and Spode were already in bed under their mosquito nets, and Ben and Vyan, coming to greet me, looked very tired and thoroughly downhearted.

‘We've been all over the country,' Vyan said wearily, ‘and found nothing to shoot at. The paddlers are pretty fed-up and poor old Charles has had to go to bed with a bad attack of lumbago.'

‘And he?' I asked, pointing to Spode's net.

‘Oh! He, poor fellow,' answered Ben, who slept near him, ‘says he was kept awake all night by wild beasts prowling round his bed and went to rest soon after we returned to camp this morning.'

I went to once to doctor Charles, who was lying uncomplaining but in great pain from an affliction he had not had before. I then woke Spode and persuaded him to join the others for an evening drink inside a large mosquito net, fifteen feet long, twelve feet wide, and twelve feet high that I had designed for just such an occasion. We sat there safe from mosquito attack and soon the drink, the smell of Jeremiah's dinner on the fire, and our exchanges of the day's news brought into being a mellow objectivity. After Spode's first laugh I went out to hold my nightly sick parade among the paddlers. Samutchoso and the rest of my party appeared to be remonstrating with unusual vehemence with those who had stayed at home. However, when they saw me they fell silent and began, half-embarrassed, to come forward with their slight ailments.

When I had finished I thought the atmosphere seemed lighter, and Karuso felt free to ask: ‘Please get us more meat. We're not getting enough food.'

‘First thing in the morning,' I promised him, and walked back to our communal net white in the darkness.

Tired, we all crept into our nets immediately after eating, and whenever I woke I heard the hippo-bull of the night before stamping and huffing and puffing with rising resentment around our beds. Once when he sounded almost on top of me I flashed my torch in his direction. The moon was rising. Though reeds and trees were too dense to reveal his shape, his eyes showed up long, slanted, and emerald green. Towards morning he seemed to accept us and withdrew to the moonlit waters with resignation. Thereafter, I believe, he learnt even to enjoy our company and the change in routine that our presence provided. He visited us nightly, announcing his arrival with a loud crash through the wing of reeds, a fat boy trying to make our flesh creep with fierce puffs of breath. For a while he would study us from all angles and then return, full of simple wonder, to his soft water, where he made solemn and reverential noises at the moon. Because he appeared alone, and celibate, and was full of devout utterance I called him Augustine, after one of my favourite saints, who I am certain would have been the first to understand since he, too, had been a bishop of Hippo. Unfortunately Spode found no joy in our hippo. He kept Spode awake for hours and in all his larded innocence added greatly to our problems.

At first light, when I took my companions their coffee with the intention of asking Vyan and Ben to go out hunting before breakfast, I found Vyan with his feet so afflicted by protracted immersion in the swamp waters that I could not think of suggesting it to him. Ben, too, looked out of his net with a flushed face, a hand shaking with fever, and a look of tightly withheld suffering on his sun-lined face. He had a high temperature and told me he had been bitten by a poisonous spider that had crept between his blankets. It lay in the earth beside his bed so crushed that it was not recognizable, but its bite clearly was dangerous. I had antidotes effective for any snake or serpent bite but knew of nothing for this kind of spider. I could only insist on his keeping quiet and drugging his pain. Charles was paralysed in the grip of lumbago. That left only Spode and me among the Europeans, and Spode arose sombre with another enigmatic variation of humour. With so much suffering around, his mood did not strike me as a gratuitous complication and for the last time I insisted on his carrying out the programme we had agreed upon. I gave the paddlers for breakfast such meat as we had left, hurried through our own so as not to miss the light for filming and, with Comfort to help me, I acted as assistant to Spode while he made some individual studies of the paddlers in camp. That was soon over. Then I asked Spode to accompany me with his camera for the rest of the day.

‘What for?' he asked.

‘For whatever we can find,' I told him. ‘You would have had some wonderful stuff to film if you'd been with me yesterday.'

He looked hard at me for a long moment and said: ‘I have not the strength. I'm not well. My back is troubling me.'

The day was riding high, wide and handsome into the deeps of the incredible blue sky. I could not argue with Spode to any good effect before the brittle company watching us so keenly; nor indeed could I force him to work when he felt he could not. Above all, I had no time to waste if I were to find food for the forty odd mouths I had to feed before the horseman of the day rode sagging on his scarlet blanket into his black stable in the west. So I just left Spode, the camp, and all in it to the great-hearted Vyan, and with the proved company of the day before took to the main stream. One extra makorro and crew of two brought up the rear. Vyan, apologetic to the last, stood on the island bank watching us out of sight.

This time we struck out up-stream. We travelled in the shelter of the papyrus on the far side of the stream for some miles until we came to a channel between two green cliffs. We turned into it and crept along it for about half a mile to emerge into a big and lovely lagoon. It was blue with light and Chinese with reeds and clumps of wild bamboo. Straight ahead of us rose a gentle yellow island mound with a great, glittering lechwe male surrounded by seven does coming like a dream of Joseph out of Pentateuch water. They were as yet totally unaware of our presence. Our guide motioned the other two makorros back into the reeds. In order to make his craft lighter he signalled to Long-axe to transfer himself to them and then with one long sweep of his paddle he took the two of us, alone, into a jungle of tall sedges at the side. There he put his paddles away, lay down in the prow with his chin over the edge and with his hands began to pull us by the shorter reeds foot by foot, slowly towards the lechwe. He did it so well and patiently that a mauve heron came floating low over my head without even looking down at us.

Once, when he paused to rest, the sweat running like water between his shoulders, I looked over the side and saw we were going down a line of baby crocodiles all drawn up, a yard apart, lips curling over white teeth at the corners, just below the surface of the still water. I tapped his shoulder to warn him, for they were old enough to bite off his fingers. He grinned endearingly and pointed at the opposite bank where another row of white-toothed infants was facing us. It all looked very official, as if we were witnessing a dress rehearsal for some trooping of crocodile colours.

I don't know how long our journey lasted, but when finally the guide motioned me to shoot and I rose carefully to my full height in the unstable craft to look over the tops of the sedges, the lechwe and his brilliant women were standing half way up the slope of the island staring hard at the place where we had first broken into the lagoon. I shot quickly and he dropped where he stood. That was one anxiety resolved. We handed over the lechwe to the crew of the extra makorro to take back to camp, and then prepared to search the backwaters to the north of the main stream for signs of people.

As I stood there once more at one with myself, my surroundings, and my companions, I saw a new column of smoke rising purple in the midst of the papyrus approximately, I judged, at the place where I thought I had seen the young woman's face in the grass. Comfort confirmed my reckoning and when I teased him, saying, ‘D'you think that smoke is perhaps just another play of water and shadow over the reeds?' he laughed though he said nothing.

‘Well,' I went on, ‘we'll go and have a closer look at that particular smoke the first clear day we get!'

His reply was prevented by the flutter of a bird which appeared on the branch of a tree on the crown of the island, crying: ‘Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick!'

They all wanted me to accept the bird's invitation at once. However, I refused, explaining carefully that I wanted to come back and film the whole honey-bird episode. Comfort, self-disciplined as ever, set the obedient example with grace. Only he could not resist whispering to me, in English, that in his view it was futile to wait, because ‘the foreign master' (as he called Spode) would never come. Not as pessimistic, or as clear-sighted, perhaps, in this regard as Comfort, I took the reappearance of the little bird as a good omen and went on happily to search island after island in the swamp.