The Lost World of the Kalahari (22 page)

Again we found no signs of recent occupation by human beings, only some more antique makorros rotting in the sun and damp. That, of course, was disappointing, and yet as the day opened out like a coral sea before us I felt increasingly uplifted by the tranquil lagoons filled and overflowing with light; and the islands, contemplative with trees and graced with palms, which succeeded one another so regularly that they still dangle like a necklace of diamonds and emeralds on a thread of gold in my memory. Each one of them seemed to have its own privileged view of intimate life of bird, reptile, and animal life to deploy for us. For instance, about midday when a wind rose to blow rose-pink through the silver air and tore the sound of our feet, like dead leaves, away over the waters behind us, we arrived at a green island meadow sunk in a round shelter of high woods. There, as still as if they were stitched petit point by point into olive-green tapestry, lay an apricot lechwe male with a harem of five all fast asleep around him. I watched them, barely thirty yards away, for twenty minutes as they continued to breathe deeply without opening an eye behind their long black lashes. My companions begged me to shoot but I couldn't do it. As we already had our daily food, I felt it would be a betrayal of natural trust and such treachery to the deep feeling of at-one-ness that had grown in me since leaving camp that I feared some terrible retribution would follow the superfluous deed. So I led my companions carefully away like someone withdrawing from the bedroom of a beloved sleeper he did not wish to wake. The last I saw of the male was his long lips ceaselessly moving as if some dream had brought him to the pastures reserved only for his translation and his gods. Also I cannot stress sufficiently what a growing relief it was not to be solicited by the noise, and importuned by the colour, of my own metropolitan time. Our senses were totally immersed in sounds and colours that had nothing to do with man. I can only say that I found a new freedom for my senses in the swamp that day, so concrete, for all its imponderable expression, that it was as if a great physical burden had been lifted from me. That freedom had a voice of its own, too, for we all spoke instinctively in tones that we did not normally use and which came from us as naturally as the sound of the wind from the trees.

So it went on until we were all resting, not in the shadows of the tsetse-fly ridden copse, but well away in the shade of a lone quiver-full of palms. Samutchoso was carefully rolling up the discarded skin of a chrome yellow cobra we had found, hung out like some dandy's washed cummerbund to dry on a screen of white thorns. The guide, I had noticed, when he found it had instantly handed it over to Samutchoso as though it were his right.

Suddenly Samutchoso looked up intently at me and said: ‘You know, Master, you won't find many Bushmen here!'

‘Why not?' I asked.

He explained at length that the tsetse fly had become so bad in the swamp that, even in his lifetime, it had forced his own people to withdraw from parts of the swamp they had occupied and cultivated before the Matabele first drove them out of the north. The Bushmen had either done likewise, or had died of sleeping sickness in the swamp.

When I asked where the surviving Bushmen had gone, he motioned vaguely with his hands, but stressed again that very many had died. Then he paused for quite a while weighing some issue carefully in his mind before he announced that he knew a place where Bushmen annually met. No! he could not say whether they were River Bushmen or not, only that they were true ‘naked Bushmen' and that the place was not in the swamp.

Where was it? I asked eagerly.

Pleased with the startling effect of his announcement, he paused dramatically, but then it all came out in spate, though as he spoke his voice was like stealthy footfall for awe of what he said. Some days' journey from the place where he lived in the swamp, he informed me, straight out into the desert, there were some solitary hills. The Bushman called them the Tsodilo Hills – the Slippery Hills, and they were the home of very old and very great spirits. He had heard that European huts were divided into many rooms, and so, he would have me know, was the interior of the Slippery Hills. In each compartment dwelt the master spirit of each animal, bird, insect, and plant that had ever been created. At night the spirits left their rooms in the hills to do their business among the creatures made after their fashion, and the spoor, the hoof-marks left by their nocturnal traffic, could be seen distinct and deep in the rocks of the Slippery Hills. In a place in the central hill lived the master spirit of all the spirits. There below it was a deep pool of water that never dried up. Beside the pool grew a tree with the fruit of knowledge on it, and hard by the tree was the rock on which the greatest spirit of all had knelt to pray the day he made the world. The dent in the rock where his vessel with sacred water had stood so that he could rinse his mouth and hands before prayer, and the marks made by his knees as he knelt to pray over his creation, could be seen to this day. All around on the smooth rock surfaces there were paintings of the animals the great spirit had made, and in all the deepest crevices lived swarms of bees that drank at the pool of everlasting water and tumbled the desert flowers to make the sweetest of honey for the spirits. There, he said, among these hills, once a year, for a short season, the Bushmen gathered.

Deeply impressed by the manner as much as the substance of what he told me, I asked how he knew all this.

He replied: ‘I have been there, Master. I have seen it all with these old eyes of mine.'

‘But how did you get there? Why did you go?' I pressed him.

‘I went many years ago, Master,' he answered with great solemnity, ‘because my own spirit was weak and weakening and I needed help to strengthen it if it were not to die. I went to those hills to ask for help and I saw all the things I have told you of, and I was helped.'

Suddenly I began to understand and wondered why I had not done so before. First, there had been that glimpse of special authority the day I hired the paddlers at Ikwagga. And now this latest incident of the discarded cobra skin which I should have remembered was one of the great medicines and symbol of eternal renewal in Africa.

‘So you –' I began.

For the first time he interrupted to say soberly: ‘Yes, Master, I am a prophet and a healer.'

However unlikely and superstitious it may sound in civilized surroundings, there on a far island in the unpredictable swamp, as the wheel of the day's light, spokes flashing with the angle of the turn, went over the hump of blue to roll down towards the night, I was not inclined to be critical. Besides, I have always had a profound respect for aboriginal superstition not as formulations of literal truth, but as a way of keeping the human spirit obedient to aspects of reality that are beyond rational articulation. Even Samutchoso's name: ‘He that was left after reaping', took on an added meaning.

I put my hand on his stained old shoulder and asked: ‘Would you take me to these hills when we have done with all this?'

He looked long at me while all the others stopped talking, before he answered steadily: ‘Yes, Master! I will take you, but on two conditions. There must be no dissention as there is now among those who come with you. You must compose your differences with one another before we set out, otherwise disaster will come. And there must be no shooting or killing of any kind on the way to the hills. No shooting, even for food, until the spirits have given permission for it. It is a law of the spirits that none must come into the hills with blood on his hand, or resentment in his heart. Even if a fly or a bee should annoy you, you must not kill it. . . . I know of a Herero cattleman who went there with his herd in the rainy season. On the way he killed a lion which attacked a cow and that night the master spirit of the lions came from the hills and devoured him and his herd. . . . If you can promise me all that, Master, I'll take you to the hills, for I too feel a need to go back there again.'

‘Of course I'll promise,' I said sincerely, not remembering that the words ‘Of course' can be unduly provocative in a country still so truly of its own dark fate as is Africa.

I returned to camp with Samutchoso's story in the forefront of my mind. I was eager to tell the others such hopeful news, but the taste for it was soon driven from my tongue. Somehow when I saw from afar three instead of two vultures outlined in the evening sky above the camp, I knew I was not going to have a chance. On arrival I found Ben was still far from well and Charles in great pain. Spode, after sweating under his blankets in the heat of the day, was only just up and not yet prepared to speak to anyone. The paddlers, with meat enough on their fires, perversely had found something new to disturb their brittle spirit. Someone had started a rumour that the launch was not coming back for us and that they would have to run the gauntlet of hippo and crocodile for two hundred miles on the main stream in their vulnerable makorros with a cargo of broken-down white people.

Comfort and I on my medicinal rounds mocked them out of that particular rumour and, as the night before, the return of Samutchoso and the rest of my black hunting companions gave them something more constructive to think about. However, the odd thing was, I discovered later, that at sundown that very evening our launch did have a major engine breakdown 180 miles up-river!

‘The trouble, Master,' Comfort said to me when we had calmed them, ‘is that Karuso is king on water, but not king on land.' He then asked as if ashamed of doing so: ‘But what will you do if the launch does not come?'

‘Don't worry,' I told him, ‘I've a good plan I'll talk over with you if it becomes necessary.'

I spoke with more confidence than I felt because the night before the same grim possibility had occurred to me and I had been unable to sleep. I had decided that should the launch not come I would shoot enough meat to dry and so provision the camp for a month. I would leave Vyan in charge with Comfort to help him and take only Long-axe, the guide, and one makorro with me. I had already been told by the guide that he knew a way across the swamp where, if I didn't mind abandoning the makorro after a while and wading up to my neck in crocodile waters, he could in two days bring me out on dry land fifty miles below ‘The Place of the Eddies'.

I was certain I could walk the fifty miles to our Land-Rovers in little over a day, and so, within three days of leaving camp, I would be in a position to organize a rescue party for the rest. I thought it wiser, however, to say none of this to the others for already there was a very negative atmosphere over the camp. So at dinner I tried to talk with a lively unconcern to my companions. However the conversation soon dwindled to an exchange between myself and Vyan, who was, at that hour, always his steadfast best. We went early to bed and all night I was aware of Spode uneasy in his net, and continually switching on his torch to shine at the places where ‘Augustine' was transported with fierce relish at the sight of our camp. Ben, too, was in great pain and twice I got up to give him medicine. Still, I hoped that by morning our prospects would look brighter to all.

I was wrong. The paddlers were back in the mood of the night before, the sick were still sick, and when I asked Spode to come filming with me he said his back was hurting him too much for work. I offered to doctor him, too, as best I could, but he said only rest could put it right. I had to repeat the pattern of the day before, leave Vyan in charge, concentrate first on meat for the camp and then on the purpose of my journey. Again my luck held. Before ten I had shot two superb buck: my first precaution in case the launch should not return. Neither was an easy shot and yet the animals dropped like stones in their tracks. I sent the extra makorro back to camp loaded to the water's brim with meat.

Relieved that the morning's housekeeping was so quickly done, I made for the new smoke uncurling over the place where I had had that tantalizing vision of a young woman's face among the reeds. Half a mile short of the smoke we found an obscure breach in the papyrus dyke against the main stream. We explored it apprehensively because the guide thought it might lead us straight into a hippo ambush. However, five minutes later we broke out of it into a characteristic Okovango back-water. Only to the east of us lay a vast expanse of papyrus already burnt down to the water's edge by the fire, running with the noise and flame of an overland train, straight into the world of green. Past the black, ash-covered waste of water ran a broad open channel, and at the far end of the channel was an island where smoke rose like a curl unwinding from a cigarette between a smoker's fingers.

‘People! Master! People!' our guide exclaimed when he saw it, so excited that he breathed like a diver coming up for air.

Before I could stop him he let out a wild exultant yell and waved his paddle in the air. As a result when we reached the island it was as quiet and deserted as a churchyard at midnight. The fire, however, was still smouldering and beyond it, tucked securely among the trees, were three substantial grass huts. The screens over their entrances were firmly held in place by bits of dead wood, but the grass was trodden down and littered with the waste-products of a prolonged occupation. The guide gave the huts only the briefest of glances before he ran off deeper into the island, calling out loudly in friendly tones in a tongue of his own.

‘They are not far away,' Samutchoso said, squatting by the fire. ‘No men, only women and children.'

I did not ask how he could tell so much from so little but he was right. Half an hour later our guide reappeared leading two shy, almost frightened women by the hand, while behind came half a dozen children. They were dressed only in blankets of skin and wore no ornaments of any kind, and to my private disappointment neither of them owned the face I had seen above the water. It is true they had clear traces of Bushman blood, and some of the children with light yellow skins, high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, looked like pure models of their Bushman prototype. I had hardly time to make the women a present of tobacco and give the children a tin of old-fashioned ‘hum-bugs', before the elder of the two disappeared into one of the huts to come back with a large heap of sun-dried Okovango bream which she thrust upon us with both hands and shining eyes. The men, they told us, had gone away some moons before to trade skins somewhere on the perimeter of the swamps for tobacco. They had no idea when they would return and meanwhile they manned the fishing traps and maintained themselves and their children alone and unarmed, without fear or complaint, in a world where I would not have liked to go without modern weapons. They had, they said, no neighbours and they knew of no Bushman communities. Since they could remember they had always been just themselves, their menfolk, and their dead parents. They followed us down to the water reluctant, now that their fears were at rest, to let us go.