The Lost World of the Kalahari (25 page)

I tried to get the two Bushmen to talk about their past but I did not devote overmuch time to it for I doubted if they had anything new to add. They had been so cut off from birth, and their spirit so deeply concussed by the headlong fall of their whole race into disaster, that I felt there was only an overall ache to communicate. I did persuade the woman to come into camp so that I could doctor a festering injury to her hand. Duncan took a photograph of her then, her lovely ghost face warming at the gift of a coloured kerchief. It was like the glow of some inherited memory, as if she could still remember what such a present could have meant to a woman like herself before life closed its doors on her and her people at both ends of its narrow corridor. However, we did film the little round of their circumscribed living in the teeming swamp, and extracted some conversation on the magnetic tape on our Ferrograph recording machine. The man, when he listened to a record of such talk played back by Charles, instinctively spoke up again where our original questions to him resounded on the tape, and endeared himself to everyone by being the first to laugh at himself when he quickly discovered his error. These, however, were the only glimpses we were allowed into their nature, for quickly the prevailing sadness would settle like a mist on the blue of an autumn evening between them and us. The husband, indeed, who was a good bit older than the other two, steadfastly declined to leave the swamp. The last I saw of him was at his fishing trap in his flat-bottomed makorro, leaning heavily on his punting pole and looking, not at our receding craft, but deeply into the water as if his spirit had need of concentration on the one element that endured unchanging in his world, into which angry men had come so thick and fast upon one another's heels to cut down, one by one, the branches of a race that it had taken many thousands of years of secluded life to grow.

That evening we sent the woman and her kinsman home to the swamp loaded with presents, and I told my companions to prepare to leave in the morning. Duncan pleaded for two more days saying there was still so much of interest to film. But I remembered the warning Samutchoso had delivered solemnly in the swamp: I would have to hasten if I wanted to see a gathering of Bushmen in the Slippery Hills. They would stay there only so long as the water in the crevices at the foot of the hills lasted, for they drew on the eternal sacred water at the top of the hills not as a routine but only in dire necessity. Already twelve days had passed since I promised to meet Samutchoso at ‘The Place of the Eddies' to guide us to the hills. Every day had added to the power and the glory of the sun. All around us the white waters were shrinking and even the great river falling fast, while my own spirit stamped like a horse kept over-long in the stable. Firmly I refused Duncan.

We sat under our great communal net in Muhembo for the last time because once in the desert, though it had its own formidable insects, there would be no mosquitoes. We talked until late to the two Europeans to whom we owed so much, and during the pauses listened to the unique sounds of the swamp. Yet we were all up early, delayed only slightly because Duncan could not be torn from a last effort to film a dawn he declared to be the greatest of all. By noon we were back at ‘The Place of the Eddies'. But Samutchoso was not there. After waiting patiently for us he had returned to his home in the swamps. While the others settled down to prepare lunch in the shade I borrowed a guide from the ferryman's family to conduct me to Samutchoso's home along the ridges of sand that were rising daily higher above the water. I found him some hours later surrounded by his women and children, all naked except for tight loin cloths round their stomachs and fishing with long baskets in a fiery lagoon just below the reed walls of the courtyard round Samutchoso's neat thatched hut. The setting, the shining hour, the leisurely occupation, and the manner in which swamp, earth, and the empty sky combined to make an impersonal law for all, reminded me vividly of the Old Testament. The impression was increased by Samutchoso's manner. The moment he saw me he waded out of the water to greet me as if I had not kept him waiting a fortnight. He asked no questions, but merely said that if I could please help him with one thing he would be ready to come with me at once. He led me into the courtyard of his home. There, full in the sun on a reed mat, lay a young emaciated boy shivering violently.

‘Please make him well, Master!' Samutchoso pleaded.

I was back in a world before drugs and patent medicines existed and when healing was achieved by faith. I had no certain idea what the boy's illness was. I listened carefully to his breathing with my ear on his hot trembling chest and instinctively chose aureo-mycin from my medicines, getting Samutchoso to explain to a wide-eyed family who had gathered around, how to continue the treatment. I was to find later that the boy recovered. That incident over, Samutchoso went into a hut and emerged almost at once with a stick and a small bundle in hand. He spoke a few words to the women and children and again there were no explanations, questions, or protests. On the faces of all was an expression of the acceptance of people accustomed to converting chance and change into the currency of fate.

That evening for the first time after many weeks, we slept again in the bush and on the deep sand of the Kalahari. The flute-like sound of the swamps had gone and in its place arose a variety of voices: night plover, screech owl, jackal, hyaena, and finally towards morning the greatest of them all, the solemn roar of a lion echoing between us and the hills.

We set off again on a cloudless morning. Ben and Vyan went ahead with two Land-Rovers to break a way through the bush: Charles, Duncan, Samutchoso, and I followed at leisure in order to be free to stop and film undisturbed.

We were trying to stalk a dazzle of zebra which flashed in and out of a long strip of green and yellow fever trees, with an ostrich, its feathers flared like a ballet skirt around its dancing legs, on their flank, when suddenly two shots, fired quickly one after the other, snapped the tense silence ahead.

My blood went cold within me. Instinctively I looked at Samutchoso. His face was without expression and yet I knew he had heard and that a change accordingly had taken place within him. With an acute sense of guilt, I realized I had forgotten to keep faith with him. My anxieties in the swamp, my absorption with the problem of Spode, the long journey out and back from Johannesburg, and many other things had overlaid the moment when he and I had first discussed the journey to the hills. I had completely overlooked the essential condition of the promise extracted by him from me: that there should be no killing on our way to the hills. I had forgotten to tell our companions of Samutchoso's account of the spirits' law against killing on approach to their home.

I tried to console myself with the facile optimism of the guilty hoping that the shots might have missed, and said nothing for the moment. We caught up with the advance guard some miles further on in a place where bush and plain had been burnt out by some hunter in preparation for the summer's rain. For miles around it was black and scorched as if a tongue of the fire which consumed Sodom and Gomorrah had licked it bare.

John and Jeremiah were close by the Land-Rover disembowelling a wart-hog. Vyan coming from afar towards us was followed by Cheruyiot with a steenbuck across his shoulders. The expression on Samutchoso's face was almost more than I could bear.

‘I'm sorry,' I said at once. ‘It's all my fault, not theirs. I forgot to tell them. I had so much trouble I forgot my promise.'

His face relaxed and he said that he understood, but the implication was that it was not for him either to understand or absolve. With that and a brief, belated explanation and warning to my hunter companions that nothing under any conditions was to be shot, I had to be content.

From there we pushed on faster because the passage over the blackened plain was easy. By eleven o'clock the highest of the hills rose above the blue of distance, and between us and them lay a bush of shimmering peacock leaves. After so many weeks in flat land and level swamp the sudden lift of the remote hills produced an immediate emotion and one experienced forthwith that urge to devotion which once made hills and mountains sacred to man who then believed that wherever the earth soared upwards to meet the sky one was in the presence of an act of the spirit as much as a feature of geology. I thought of the psalmist's ‘I will uplift my eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help,' and marvelled that the same instinct had conducted Samutchoso to the hills to pray.

The nearer we came the stronger this impression grew, and as the hills rose at last clear above the bush they seemed to communicate their own atmosphere to us all. The highest could not have been more than a thousand feet. But they rose sheer out of the flat plain and were from the base up made entirely of stone, and this alone, in a world of deep sand, gave them a sense of mystery. The others, too, felt it. We stopped, and Charles and I climbed on to the roof of my Land-Rover to observe them through field glasses. Jeremiah, who knew nothing of Samutchoso's story, stared hard at the hills. He had been for a short while to a mission school in Barotseland and now he said suddenly in a small voice: ‘Master, they look like the rocks Moses struck in the desert to let out water for the Israelites!'

The rock on the highest of the hills certainly was imposing. Blue and shining like tempered steel, it covered the steep flanks in smooth slabs often a hundred feet or more high. On one of the highest faces there appeared to be rust-red markings of a curiously hieroglyphic design. Charles, for one moment, thought they were ancient Egyptian silhouettes painted on the rock, and my own heart beat faster for I had nursed a hope that here might be some isolated and secure place in the sandy desert with sufficient rock to enable the Bushman to practise his age-old art of painting. But long scrutiny through glasses disillusioned us both. The markings were of the terrible extremes of weather and time.

After that we studied the hills for signs of smoke but not a wisp was to be seen. We consoled ourselves with the thought that it was not the hour for smoke. Also, according to Samutchoso, the Bushmen camped in the hidden bush at the centre of the horse-shoe swing of the hills. Slowly we moved closer, the sand getting deeper, the bush more dense, and the blue hills higher. There was no wind, not even a heat whorl to contort the terrible calm of the day on the face of the hills. The bushes in the crevices between the stony slabs looked more like objects petrified in stone than pliable leaves and branches. Nor was there a sound to be heard. At any moment I expected the inevitable baboon to challenge us, but it never did. I searched the blueblack sky arched over us like the span of a bridge drumming with the urgent traffic of darkness massing beyond the sun. But both it and the blue water below the arch were empty of the hawk, buzzard, and vulture that normally man the lofty foretop of the desert day. Indeed, it was as if everything that might have distracted our senses from the Slippery Hills deliberately had been cancelled from the scene. The hills were in sole command and so dominated our impressions that the two Land-Rovers, their behinds wiggling and waggling over the rough roadless plain as they searched for camping site and water, seemed like puppies fawning towards the feet of a stern master.

When we caught up again with the advance Land-Rovers some hours later the vehicles were halted deep in the bush on the far side of the hills. The doors of both were flung wide open as if hastily abandoned. Ben, Vyan, Cheruyiot, and John had all disappeared. The heat was overwhelming because the vast slabs of rock fired in the noon-day sun added a gratuitous quota of degrees to the temperature. The silence was deeper than ever, and I was aware only of the sun flame hissing like a brood of yellow cobras in my ears. I thought of calling aloud to Vyan and Ben, but one look at the silent world of rocks and the tawny fringe of burning bush on the horseshoe crest above, forbade me. Any violence of sound I feared could be dangerously resented. I did not want to risk worsening our situation for already, in the crescent of the sullen rock, I felt rather like a mouse between the paws of a great cat.

I went and joined Samutchoso and the others underneath the tattered shade of a tree and said in a whisper, ‘No good fussing. The bush is thick here. I expect they've gone on foot to reconnoitre and will be back soon.'

As I said it I had an idea Samutchoso did not take their absence so lightly. However, I put it down to guilty conscience over my broken promise and tried to think no more of it.

An hour later the others broke out of the bush almost on top of us. We had had no warning of their coming for the air was so thin and stricken with heat that it had not life enough to carry sound. They were all four exhausted, eager to join us under our tree, and to impart their news. They had seen no smoke and no traces of Bushman old or new. They had found a good level place for a camp under trees that threw real shade, near a deep cut in overhanging rock where water still oozed through.

‘It's lovely pure water,' Ben said. ‘But, my word it's plagued with bees! Never seen so many wild bees in my life! We had difficulty in getting a drink without being stung.'

The sun was setting by the time we had made camp, collected wood for our fires, and installed ourselves for a stay of several days. Still no sound or movement came from bush or hills. Even a stir of evening air would have been welcome to ease the immovable and shining heat hanging in the horseshoe bowl of rocks. Just before dark I took my gun and walked alone to the narrow gap between the highest of the hills in the hope that there I might meet some cooling air. But it was just as bad there so I started back at a quickened pace because the light was fast beginning to fail, and the silent raised rock faces made me feel acutely uncomfortable. In that red afterglow of an immense Kalahari sunset they had a strange, living personality as if their life had been only temporarily suspended in the sleep of motion that we call ‘matter', and they might wake up, at any moment step down, and walk the desert on some cataclysmic occasion of their own.