The Lost World of the Kalahari (30 page)

So the day went quickly by. At noon we did not halt for food but went from one group of shelters to the other meeting new arrivals and making ourselves better known to the old. At each shelter we left a small present of tobacco and the promise to help them hunt for more food. Whatever apprehension may have been felt about our arrival it was, I believe, largely vanquished by that calm, leisurely coming and going between our camp and their shelters. I was not naïve enough to imagine all reservations had been conquered. But when, towards evening, I mentioned the critical matter of water and Bauxhau immediately offered to show us how they themselves dealt with the problem, I felt the major battle of our first contact had been won.

In the cool of the evening they and Xhooxham, ‘Lips of Finest Fat', led us some miles away to the deepest part of the old watercourse between dunes yellow in the sun. There we found several shallow excavations dug for water in ampler seasons. But the supply which never failed them was hidden, safe from evaporation of sun and wind, deep beneath the sand. Near the deepest excavation Bauxhau knelt down and dug into the sand to arm's length. Towards the end some moist sand but no water appeared. Then he took a tube almost five feet long made out of the stem of a bush with a soft core, wound about four inches of dry grass lightly around one end presumably to act as a kind of filter against the fine drift sand, inserted it into the hole and packed the sand back into it, stamping it down with his feet. He then took some empty ostrich egg-shells from Xhooxham and wedged them upright into the sand beside the tube, produced a little stick one end of which he inserted into the opening in the shell and the other into the corner of his mouth. Then he put his lips to the tube. For about two minutes he sucked mightily without any result. His broad shoulders heaved with the immense effort and sweat began to run like water down his back. But at last the miracle happened and so suddenly that Jeremiah gasped and I had an impulse loudly to cheer. A bubble of pure bright water came out of the corner of Bauxhau's mouth, clung to the little stick, and ran straight down its side into the shell without spilling one precious drop!

So it continued, faster and faster until shell after shell was filled, Bauxhau's whole being and strength joined in the single function of drawing water out of the sand and pumping it up into the light of day. Why he did not fall down with exhaustion I do not know. I tried to do it and though my shoulders are broad and my lungs good, I could not extract a single drop from the sand. We named that place, where we saw one of the oldest of legends about the Bushman become a miraculous twentieth-century fact, ‘The Sip-wells'. Were it not for the water we extracted we could not have stayed there in the central desert, but would have had continually to go laboriously back and forth between it and our own remote water-points. And of course without the sip-wells Nxou and his people could not have survived there at all between the rains.

We were on our way back from the sip-wells, the dunes in the west sharply outlined against a crimson sky, and I was feeling not only content but also warmed and illumined as with revelation, when we came upon another astonishing sight. The bush and plain was just beginning to resound with the call of night-jars, the melancholy cry of carrion birds, and mournful bark of jackal. One would have thought that all good Bushmen would have been sitting around the fires at the mouths of their shelters seeking safety from lion or leopard. But on the edge of the bush, a mile from our camp, we overtook a brave little procession composed of three of the four children, all up to their ears in thorn and grass. A little boy, grubbing stick in hand, led the procession with a bundle full of roots, tubers, caterpillars, and succulent grubs in his hand.

A small girl, whose name meant ‘Spoor of Gazelle', followed with a bundle of wild and sun-dried berries and rare groundnuts. She was already clearly a little mother to her companions because, although she followed the boy in front dutifully like a wife, she made sure by constant backward glances and affectionate exhortations that the youngest of all, who was in the rear, stayed close to her. He carried a large tortoise in a hand held level with his shoulder, and he was breathless with the conflicting efforts of supporting it and keeping up with his elders in front.

Nxou's face when he saw them was instantly warm with affectionate delight. He went on his knees beside them, peered into their bundles, and uttered such sounds of astonishment and appreciation that the children, who clearly loved him dearly, stood shaking with laughter of sheer joy despite their fatigue. When Nxou took up the tortoise he made a great fuss over it and, according to Dabe, told the little boy that if he gave that to his grandmother she would certainly tell him a bed-time story that would last well into the night.

In their company we came home, the light of our fires red on the leaves of the trees standing solemnly under the darkness which was about to crush the last glimmer of a great day. All evening long we sat by our fires comparing our impressions and I was not surprised that we all shared the main one. None of us doubted that we had struck a pure Bushman community living their Stone Age life. Even I, who was most ready to distrust the conventional portrait of the Bushman and the grotesque caricature of his life drawn in our histories, had not imagined it would be like this. I had not expected anything so comely, dignified, and orderly. In the past, wherever I had broken through into lonely communities in remote regions of Africa, some clear demonstration of the impact and excitement of the arrival of a rare stranger, particularly a red stranger, had always greeted me. Here there had been none, just everywhere a formal exchange of greetings and welcome. Of course Nxou had prepared his people for our coming and this must have had something to do with the calmness of their response. Yet I did not believe that to be the whole story. I suspect it went much deeper and had to do with fundamental questions of birth and breeding in the spirit of an ancient centred people. In the days that followed the suspicion sharpened and gradually became certainty.

Daily, the lies and the distortions of the past were thrown more firmly into our faces by this small but self-contained Stone Age example. Daily, I became more convinced that in this regard our version of history was largely rationalization and justification of our own lack of scruple and excess of greed, and that the models drawn upon by historians and artists must have been the Bushmen nearest them who had already been wrenched out of their own authentic pattern to become debased by insecurity and degraded by helplessness against our well-armed selfishness. I could not explain on any other basis the stories of Bushman excess and apathy handed down as universal facts. One story, for instance, which I have seen repeated in many an anthropological and scientific treatise, states that the Bushman is so unconscious a creature that after gorging himself with food like a python he will go to sleep and, when the pangs of hunger again begin to stir, he will merely draw the band of skin tighter and tighter around his stomach until at last only death from starvation serves to make him conscious enough to go out once more to hunt.

This certainly was not true of our sip-wells community or the few other little groups we found on our rounds while based with them in the central desert. When they killed more game than usual they would certainly treat the occasion as a feast day, eat largely, and perhaps sleep through the day. But on the whole they were contained in a natural sense of discipline and proportion and curiously adjusted to the harsh desert reality. They never ate all their meat at one sitting. Whenever possible they set something aside for a leaner day. Later on their stories clearly showed us that they had considered the ways of the ant and bee and had been made wise thereby. Most of the meat was immediately cut into strips and skilfully dried in the shade and wind to become for them what pemmican was to Eskimo and Red Indian. It was most impressive to see them skin and cut up game. Nothing was wasted or discarded except the gall and dung in the stomach. The entrails were cleaned and preserved, and even the half-digested grasses in the paunch were wrung out like washing for the juices they contained, and these collected in the skin and drunk by the hunters to save their precious water. In case of need they even stored water in ostrich egg-shells on the extreme perimeter of their permanent base at the sip-wells. One day out hunting with Nxou and Bauxhau some seventy miles from the sip-wells I was puzzled to see them break away from the spoor we were following in the terrible heat of the day and make for particular scrub which, to me, was exactly like the desert of scrub around us. They dug into the sand and disclosed a cache of six ostrich egg-shells filled with water from which they emptied two before covering the rest carefully again with sand. The same foresight and sense of economy seemed to go into their building of fires which they made in the classical way of rotating a round rod of hard wood between their hands in a hole in a small board of softer wood at their feet. There was never any shortage of firewood. It is one of my greatest joys to build big camp fires in the desert and sit in the night in a Gothic structure of tall aspiring firelight, with my companions grouped around for comfort and conversation. They were, I suspect, shocked by the extravagance: their own fires were so discreet, neat, and unwasteful of wood.

Nor, when fed, did they lie apathetically all day long round their shelters. They were always going about work of some kind. The younger men like Nxou, Bauxhau, and Tsexchi were constantly out hunting for game. Nxou, who was not only the moving spirit among the three but the outstanding personality in the little community and clearly destined to become its leader, was utterly dedicated to his hunter's role. We soon saw why he was called ‘A Bowl of Food', for that is what he was as hunter to the bodies, and as musician to the spirit of his people.

Daily, too, the younger women and children went out with their grubbing sticks to look for food in the sands of the desert. Whenever I accompanied them the intelligence, diligence, and speed with which they harvested the earth never ceased to astonish me. A tiny leaf almost invisible in grass and thorn just above the surface of the red sand and to me indistinguishable from many others, would cause them to kneel down and grub deftly with their wooden digging sticks to produce what I, in my ignorance of Kalahari botany, called wild carrots, potatoes, leeks, turnips, sweet potatoes, and artichokes. One of their greatest delicacies was a ground-nut which, when roasted on their fires, would eliminate all rivals from cocktail counters. And, of course, they loved the wild tsamma melon in all forms, and highly prized the eland cucumber. This last was so near to its European counterpart in flavour and texture, despite the fact that it was protected with formidable thorn on the outside, that from it Jeremiah made salad and vegetable dishes for us. All this was achieved at the worst time of the year. I longed to see the riches that could be garnered in the full harvest of summer.

While the hunters were out the older people did the maintenance work of the community: repaired the bows and arrows and the long ‘fishing rods', and prepared the poisons used in hunting. This they did out of a deadly compound of a mysterious grub found in summer at the end-root of a certain desert bush, powdered cobra poison, and a gum produced by chewing a special aloe blade in the mouth and then mixing the extract in a wooden cup with the other powders. They also cured and tanned the skins of the buck brought home by the hunters. When I looked back on the laborious methods used on our own farms I was amazed at the speed and skill with which they worked. They were natural botanists and chemists and had an unbelievable knowledge of the properties of desert plants. A bulb gave them the acid to remove the hair from the skin without damage, another softened it in a remarkably short time. This activity was of particular importance to the community. These skins produced for them the ‘iron' they used for their arrows, spears, and knives. From time to time one of them would vanish with a parcel of skins to contact someone who had a definite link with an African or European outpost where these things could be bartered.

They also made the tough Bushman rope used in their bows, snares, and daily round of living. They did this by extracting from wild Kalahari sisal long silky threads which they plaited and spun into rope of all lengths and thickness. We watched one of them producing a length of rope with only a springbuck horn and his toes and fingers as instruments, and using his thighs as work table. When finished we had a bet on its quality, and set Nxou and the maker tugging against each other to try and break it. But they failed.

Swift and neat efficiency really was an impressive feature of this community. Whenever called upon to do so they worked with devotion and will. Their arrows, spears, skins, ropes, and snares were not merely functional but beautifully marked in a manner which showed that they were also an image of spirit. The older women, in their spare moments, made beads out of broken ostrich egg-shells and strung them into necklaces or the broad shining bands which they wore around their heads for ceremonial occasions. Hour after hour they would sit chipping nimbly and delicately with the sharp end of a springbuck ram's bone at a fragment of shell in order to produce one little round white disk from the brittle and fragile raw material. According to Dabe they seldom got more than three beads out of one huge shell, and as a headband needed hundreds of beads the task obviously was prodigiously exacting and long. Yet they kept at it diligently, the same look on their faces that I have seen in the eyes of silversmiths at work in the bazaars of Aleppo and Damascus. Every woman and girl child possessed several necklaces and at least one glittering headband, apart from the beads used to decorate the leather wrap, shawl, and shoulder satchel which were their only covering. Sometimes, too, they carved greater beads out of a crimson root and amber wood, and this combination of ivory white shell, crimson, and amber jewellery on the smooth apricot skins between the firm round breasts of the younger women seemed to me as truly belonging as a ruby garland against the skin of a Hindu deity. Some of the men, particularly Bauxhau, patiently carved abstract patterns into the ostrich egg-shells that were their drinking vessels. The designs were either dyed ink-black with some vegetable extract, or burnt in with fire.