The Lost World of the Kalahari (26 page)

At this point I was deeply startled by a sound coming from the rocks on my right. I swung round, my gun ready, and the hair slowly creeping at the back of my neck. A superb kudu bull with an immense spread of curved Viking horn above his long pointed face, was making his way from ledge to ledge down a crimson cleft in the rocks. He moved with utter confidence, free of fear or hurry, passed close by me without a sideways glance, and made straight for the gap in the hills. Perhaps, I thought, he is one of the master spirits of which Samutchoso had spoken, who, now that night has come, is going from his dwelling in the rocks to do business among creatures in the world beyond? He vanished thus, leaving me to return to camp more subdued than ever.

It is significant that none of us was at ease during all that first night in the hills. At first light the camp came alive as though glad to be rid of such darkness, and everyone, without urging from me, began preparing vigorously for the day. Just before sunrise, however, we had an abrupt and odd interruption. Suddenly we were attacked by bees. From all directions, through the trees, they came winging sonorously at this unfamiliar hour. I have never witnessed anything like it. They came to sting, not in angry militant swarms but in great, shapeless dark-brown hordes, humming an esoteric tune of exhortation, crawling all over us and our belongings as if to sweep us, by sheer weight of numbers and volume of sound, out of their way. The smell and taste of our water could not have attracted them because they ignored it, as also the sugar set out for our breakfast coffee. They seemed interested only in beating their wings against our faces, crawling up our sleeves and trousers, and from time to time driving the mysterious point of their visitation home with a perfectly timed sting in the most tender spots.

Perturbed by the thought of the retaliation the bees might provoke, I warned the camp: ‘Don't kill any of them whatever else you do.'

If I had hoped to please Samutchoso by my admonition it proved vain because his expression clearly implied that the warning would have served us better had it been delivered two days earlier. Everyone except myself was stung several times, and the camp was made to look foolish and ridiculously disordered by the evasive action, the involuntary jerks, sudden spasms, jumps, cries of protest, and all other unnatural efforts at self-control upon which I insisted. Then the moment the first shaft of wild sunlight struck at the camp through the purple gap in the hills, without sip of water or taste of sugar to sweeten their throats which must have been well-night hoarse with chanting, the bees withdrew suddenly as if on a signal from central command. Ben had been stung the most badly. He, too, had been the most sceptical of Samutchoso's story and the dictate against killing when we discussed it the night before round the fire, but I didn't carry that thought far. We ate our breakfast in unusual silence, with unexpectedly chastened expressions. However, hot food, coffee, and tobacco soon restored the spirits of my companions and they followed me out of camp to start the day's work with a will.

Our plan was, first, to examine the places at the base of the hills where Samutchoso knew Bushmen occasionally gathered. We walked in extended single-file because the bush of wide-spreading, bone-white acacia thorn was as tangled and plaited as it was dense. However Samutchoso, who led the way, soon found an easier game track which at intervals opened out on small clearings from which the rock faces were visible stark, bold and forbidding. The night did not appear to have improved the mood of the hills and I was not surprised when the bush itself came suddenly to a shuddering halt, leaving a clear space between itself and the base of the central hill as if centuries before it had learnt the importance of keeping a respectful distance from such reserved and imperious beings. Beneath the hills the shadows were cool and heavy, but, far above, the ragged, jagged shark's tooth edges of the purple crags were lined with warm sunlight. However, below the bright hem of that still morning one saw other cuts, wounds, and scars in the steep surfaces that from a distance looked so impervious. There was hardly a face that was not torn, pock-marked, pitted, and wrinkled as if with incredible suffering and struggling. Everywhere great fragments had broken away to lie in massive splinters in the sand at the base, or to balance precariously on the edge of an abyss. Now one understood better the stern mood of the place, because one was looking on an entire world of rock, isolated and without allies of any kind, making a heroic-stand against disintegration by terrible forces of sand, sun, and time. It was an awesome spectacle, because neither the rock nor the forces deployed against it would give or accept quarter. As I was looking sombrely into those stony faces I heard an almost reproachful exclamation from Samutchoso at my side: ‘Master, but do you not see?'

Both his voice and pointing finger were trembling with emotion. Over the scorched leaves of the tops of the bush conforming to a contour nearby, and about a hundred feet up, was a ledge of honey-coloured stone grafted into the blue iron rock. Above the ledge rose a smooth surface of the same warm, soft stone curved like a sea-shell as if rising into the blue to form a perfect dome. But it curved upwards thus for only about twenty feet and then was suddenly broken. I had no doubt I was looking at the wall and part of the ceiling of what had once been a great cave in the hills, safe above the night-prowl of the bush, and with an immense view into the activities of the flat Kalahari beyond. Some yellow stone from the dome of the cave was tipped precariously on the edges of the ledge, other fragments were toppled into the red sand at the base. But what held my attention still with the shock of discovery was the painting that looked down at us from the centre of what was left of the wall and dome of the cave. Heavy as were the shadows, and seeing it only darkly against the sharp morning light, it was yet so distinct and filled with fire of its own colour that every detail stood out with a burning clarity. In the focus of the painting, scarlet against the gold of the stone, was an enormous eland bull standing sideways, his massive body charged with masculine power and his noble head looking as if he had only that moment been disturbed in his grazing. He was painted as only a Bushman, who had a deep identification with the eland, could have painted him. Moreover, it seemed that he had been painted at a period before the Bushman's serenity was threatened, for the look of calm and trustful inquiry on the eland's face was complete. I was greatly moved because it seemed to me that this was the look with which not only the eland but the whole of the life of Africa must have regarded us when first we landed there. On the left of the bull, also deep in scarlet, was a tall female giraffe with an elegant Modigliani neck. With the tenderness of a solicitous mother she was looking past the eland towards a baby giraffe standing shyly in the right of the picture. In the same right-hand corner of the canvas below them the artist had signed this painting on the high wall with a firm impress of the palms of both hands, fingers extended and upright. The signature was marked so gaily and spontaneously that it brought an instant smile to my face. It looked so young and fresh that it mocked my recollection that rock-paintings signed in this manner are among the oldest in the world.

‘How old is it, Samutchoso?' I asked.

‘I do not know, Master,' he replied. ‘I only know it was like this when my grandfather found it as a boy, and from what he told me and what I have seen myself it never gets older.'

‘You mean the colours do not fade?'

‘No! The colours do not fade, Master,' he answered, and would, I think, have said more if our party, one by one, had not been forming round us. They, too, fell silent when they saw the painting of the bull and his two companions standing there so serenely in that quiet viaduct of time.

Duncan was the first to break the silence with an excited command to Cheruyiot: ‘Jambo, my tripod, quick!'

He set up his camera, trained a telescopic lens on the painting, and began filming. The film ran for only a few seconds when the precise whirr of the mechanism became blurred and the camera suddenly stopped.

‘That's odd,' Duncan said, examining it, ‘the magazine's jammed and yet it's brand new.'

Samutchoso looked from him to me with the same expression I had observed on his face during the invasion of the bees in our camp, but said nothing. Duncan loaded the camera with another magazine and began filming again. A few seconds later exactly the same stoppage occurred.

‘This is most extraordinary!' he exclaimed, beginning to look disconcerted. ‘All the time I've been with you I've had no trouble of this kind and now two jams in as many minutes. It's unbelievable. But never mind! Third time lucky!' He started the third and only spare magazine. In the same number of brief seconds the third magazine jammed.

‘This is fantastic,' he cried, now thoroughly upset. ‘In all the years I've filmed this has never happened before. I'm afraid I'll have to go back to the camp, clear these magazines, and fetch the remaining spares before I can go on.'

While he and Cheruyiot returned to camp, we closed in on the base of the rocks that now seemed to stare back at us in the swelling light and heat of day with a glimmer of grim satisfaction, and started to follow the rocky contour on the ground. Soon we found other fragments of painting. Indeed, where there was rock smooth enough for the purpose there were inevitably traces of painting. On the whole they were not as vivid and clear as the great raised piece, perhaps because they were even older. The rock surfaces themselves had been destroyed by weather and time. The subjects were almost entirely animal, many of them of animals which, like the charging rhinoceros, no longer existed in that part of the world, and belonged to the earliest period of Bushman painting when, like the fabulous world of Aesop, the artist's vision of himself and his nature were still utterly contained in the glittering mirror of animal life before him. In one deep bay in the cliffs we came across what must have been the master of masterpieces among the Slippery Hills. The rock rose smooth and sheer out of the sand, and for a distance of about forty feet, and twelve feet high, it was painted with a crowded scene of the animal world. Most of this immense frieze was faded, torn, or semi-obliterated, but there was enough clear detail left to charge one's blood with excitement at the stature of the original conception and the complicated achievement of the artist. The presence in one corner of a tall, elongated man suggested that the art was later than the others. But how could one tell? I only know that from that morning I have been pursued by a vision of those hills as a great fortress of once living Bushman culture, a Louvre of the desert filled with treasure. I would have given a great deal to have seen those sullen, hurt, rock faces in their original well-loved state, redeemed and glowing with ardent colour under a far blue Kalahari heaven, while daily the golden hunters came home to them from the plain, laden with game, to sit securely round their fires, eating meat and honey, washing down a draught of mead with the rare water filtered through the crevices, and perhaps discussing the latest picture hung in their absence in the contemporary wing of the gallery of time towering behind them.

From this old master we worked our way around the base of the hill for close on a mile, becoming so absorbed in the painting that I forgot we were also to look for Bushmen. A shout from Samutchoso, who had gone on well ahead, brought me back to my immediate task and the reality of the burning noon-day hour. We found him in the midst of what was obviously the site of a recent Bushman encampment. There were the light screens of grass and acacia branches to shelter them against the sun and dew, and all round the sand was thickly strewn with broken and empty nutshells, wilted melon skins, rabbit fur, porcupine quills, tortoise shells, and the hooves of animals. There were several fresh giraffe shinbones cleared of every scrap of meat and sinew and the marrow the Bushman so relishes. Finally, there were the unscattered ashes of their fires, a torn leather satchel sewn with sinew, and decorated with ostrich egg-shell beads which a Bushman hunter carries on his shoulder, as well as a broken four-stringed Bushman lyre.

‘They've gone,' Samutschoso told me, letting some nutshells trickle through his fingers. ‘They've gone until next winter. Left about a week ago!'

‘Perhaps they've moved round the hill to a new site nearer water?' I suggested.

‘No, Master,' Samutchoso answered firmly. ‘The main drinking water is in the rocks over there. It is only the everlasting water that is on the hill above it.'

There and then, hot as it was, we climbed to both waters. The first, almost hidden by the hordes of bees drinking at it, filled the long narrow cleft that contained it, but one could tell from the slow drip through the veins in the rocks which fed it from above that, once emptied, it would not be filled again until the next rains. The ‘everlasting water', as was expected by those who believed Samutchoso, led us to quite a different world.

We climbed up to it by a clearly defined track, the natural stepping stones worn smooth and shining with centuries of traffic. The moment one began to mount steeply one was aware that it was no ordinary track. It was too direct in its approach to be just another of the game tracks which, like the spokes of a sunwheel from their hub, led from the hills through the plain to the far horizon. This track had been extensively decorated. At several places where the rock presented a smooth enough surface it was highly painted. One would lift oneself up from one shelf to another to find oneself staring into the face of a rhinoceros regarding one without fear or favour; or a tortoise, head out and cocked to one side as if listening to our wilful steps, would suddenly confront one as if to imply a rebuke to the sweating procession climbing so frantically towards the summit. At another place we observed what must have been a crowded scene of the animal world, a farewell celebration, perhaps, to pilgrims on their way to the austere summit above. Finally, just below the last rim of rocks wherein the ‘everlasting' water lay, there was a group of vigilant painted animals assembled on a ledge rather like passport officers at a frontier. This, of course, was a subjective reaction, but perhaps, to some extent, it was also true objectively and with this last painting an emotional circle was made complete for the painter. From the first clarion utterance of eland and giraffe on the raised rock to this final inspection on a far animal frontier, we seemed to be in the presence of a single system of spirit dedicated to the translation of flesh and blood into a greater idiom of the world beyond, where fruit of true knowledge purported to grow by everlasting water. I even wondered whether, with our profane guns and prying cameras, we were not clambering over the forsaken altars of a great natural temple.