The Lost World of the Kalahari (34 page)

In this manner they danced their way into the life of their beloved eland and their mystical participation in his being. They danced him in the herd, his cows, heifers, and children around him. They danced him in his courting right up to the moment where, fastidious animal that he is, he vanishes alone, with his woman, for his love-making in the bush. They danced him grown old, challenged, and about to be displaced by the young bulls in the herd. Quite naturally the older men became the challenged, the younger the challengers. The movements of the dancers, the expression on their faces, and the voices crying ‘Oh!' from far down in their throats and straight from the source where the first man had his being, greatly moved us. We saw the lust for battle in the young faces; the look of perplexity in the eyes of the women torn between loyalty to a former lord and obedience to the urge of new life within them, we saw the agony of impending defeat in the expression of the old bulls. And we saw life decide the battle; the old cast out from the herd while the young, with unbelievable tenderness, put an arm around the shoulders of a woman become suddenly still with the acceptance of her fate, and so move inexorably together towards the oncoming night.

The darkness fell quickly because of the rising storm, and the dance of the Eland naturally made way for the greatest of all the Bushman dances: The Fire Dance. Here the women, without a pause, grouped themselves singing in the centre of the clearing. Quickly they piled a fire there, lit it the classical way, and then an uncle of Nxou's led the men in a ring dancing around the fire. They danced the first Bushman soul setting out in the darkness, before mind or matter, to look for substance for fire. They looked in vain for its spoor in the sand as if fire were some subtle animal. Hour after hour they went round and round in the same circle without finding it. They called on the sun, moon, and stars to give them fire. Then we saw them leading the blind companions who, in some prehistoric period of the quest, had gone too near the scorching flames. Because it was a sacred dance we noticed how in the progress of his search the seeker now acquired the power of healing. Suddenly he would break off his dancing to stand behind a moaning woman and, with trembling hands draw out of her the spirit that was causing her unrest, emitting in the process the cry of the animal with which the alien invader was identified. That done, he would return to join the magic circle still dancing in search of fire. How the dancers found the power to go on ever faster and faster, hour after hour, seemed beyond explanation or belief. They danced so hard and long that the circle in the sand became a groove, then the groove a ditch high up to their calves. Long before the end they seemed to pass over into a dimension of reality far out of reach of my understanding, and to a moment and a place which belonged only technically to the desert in which we were all gathered. Indeed, so obsessed did the men become by this search for fire that they were drawn nearer and nearer to the flames beside which the woman sat. Then, suddenly, they halved the circle and went dancing with their bare feet through the middle of the flames. But even that was not the end of the quest. Now, the longing became so intense that two of the older women were kept constantly busy preventing some fire-obsessed man from breaking out of the circle and hurling himself head first straight into the flames, like a moth overcome by excess of longing for the light. Indeed one man did break through, and before he could be stopped had scooped up a handful of burning coals and attempted to swallow them whole.

All the while, in the ebb of the music rising and falling like a tide around us, the noise of the thunder rose louder in our ears. The lightning began to play incessantly overhead and to wash the dancers yellow in a Nibelungen gold. It sounded as if the whole of nature was being mobilized to participate in this expression of man's first and still unfulfilled quest. The jackals, hyaenas, the shriek owls, the male ostriches booming, all seemed stirred to howl and scream as never before, and beyond the sipwells the lions roared back deeply and most strangely at them, at us, and at the storm. Towards the end the men's feet together were beating the earth so fast and regularly that it was difficult to believe that the noise was made by the feet of many men and not by a single automatic piston.

At last, here and there, a dancer began to fall in his tracks. The two older women would pick him up and carry him aside where he lay moaning in a trance of fatigue in the darkness. Then, almost on the second of midnight, the hero of the dance, Nxou's slender and comely uncle, suddenly found fire the way it was meant to be found. He knelt down reverently beside it, the singing died away in one last sob of utter exhaustion, the dancers sank to the earth while the man picked up the coals in his naked hands and arose to scatter them far and wide for all the world to share. He stood there swaying on his feet, the sweat of an unimaginable exertion like silk tight upon his skin, dazed with the anguish of near-disaster in doom of eternal darkness as well as by the climax of deliverance. Swaying, he made a gesture and uttered words of prayer to the night around him. What the words were I never knew, except that Dabe said they were too ancient for him to understand. All I do know is that I myself felt very near the presence of a god and my eyes seemed blinded as if by sudden revelation. In the darkness beyond the sip-wells, on the high dunes at the back of the heroic dancer, the lightning struck with a savage, kriss-like cut at the trembling earth, so near that the crackle of its fire and the explosion of the thunder sounded simultaneously in my ear. And at that moment the rain fell.

It rained all night. I thought I had never heard a sweeter sound than it made on the tarpaulin over my head and in the sand within reach of my hand. So close had my search in the past few weeks brought me to the earth, its elements, and its natural children that throughout the rest of the eventful night in my half-waking condition I felt I had re-discovered the first language of all things and could hear plainly the deep murmur of the earth taking the rain into her like a woman taking a lover into her arms, all the more ardently because secretly she had doubted that he would ever come. I went on lying there in the darkness as if in the presence of Gods and Titans. All around me the voice of the thunder, now deafening with nearness, now solemn with distance, was like the voice Moses heard on his mountain-top in the desert of Sinai. When the dawn broke it was still raining heavily, and already there was a bloom of quickening new life in leaf, grass, and mark.

For once Nxou did not come to me at dawn. He appeared with Bauxhau about noon, both running and laughing with joy at their pretended dismay at the cold impact of the rain on their warm, naked skins. We took them into our shelter and there, over mugs of hot coffee, it happened. Suddenly with the two of them I had the same feeling that I had had with the earth and rain in the previous night. For the first time since I had met them we had access to the same language of meaning.

On the impulse I asked: ‘Nxou, who was the first Bushman in the world?'

The old look of reserve flickered for a second over his fine-drawn face. Then his eyes cleared and he said: ‘If someone told me his name was Oeng-oeng, I would not know how to say “no”.'

‘So the first Bushman was called Oeng-oeng?' I quickly followed up.

‘Yes! Oh, yes! Yes!' he answered, his eyes shining as if he was even more pleased than I that at last the barrier was down. ‘His name was Oeng-oeng.'

‘Indeed,' said Bauxhau grinning, ‘he was Oeng-oeng.'

Then it all poured out. We sat there for the rest of the day listening to their stories. Charles, who had come back with Ben and Vyan some days before after they had gone out to one of our supply points to re-fuel and re-provision, happier than ever to be with us, moved quietly in the background to record all they told us. In the days that followed, whenever we had leisure from hunting or filming the process went on, from the first version of creation and Nxou's Shakespearian assertion that there was ‘a dream dreaming us,' to the last tangled and tortured expression of spirit when his forefathers were brutally torn from the main trunk of their race and flung far out into the desert. Happy, at last, to be able to share with us what was also most precious to them, they poured out all before us. I would have loved to question and elucidate but I was afraid, unwittingly, to intrude and cause damage. Already with our radio-active intellects we had hurt so deeply the first spirit of Africa. So I just listened, entranced.

They spoke fluently, vividly, and with great variety of tone and gesture. Often I could tell what they were saying before Dabe and Ben could translate it. For instance, in a hot afternoon Nxou was telling me one of his favourite stories, a tale of an eland, the first man, his greedy children, a turtle dove, and an unfailing source of honey, all full of magic and resolved with a miracle of resurrection out of a corruption of worm and dust in the earth. Now the toes of the eland are long and elastic so that they can splay out the hoof like a palm of a hand to make his going over the desert sand easier, and as he lifts his majestic foot the toes snap back into position with a wonderful electric click. When Nxou came to the part where the god-like eland is going unwittingly to his doom, he imitated the sound the eland makes when he walks in the silences of the desert so vividly that Ben, who had dozed off in the heat, woke, jumped up and seized his gun, saying: ‘Quick! Did you hear that? There must be eland just behind that bush!'

The Bushman stories and mythology I must record at another time. But I will mention just one of their beliefs because it played a practical role during our visit at the sip-wells. We all, of course, know the myth of Cupid armed with a bow and arrow. To me it was an archaic symbol of no great consequence to the spirit of my own time. But to the Bushman it has a living and immediate meaning. In a hunter's community the imagery of the bow naturally went deep, and there was still magic in it. The bow was as much an instrument of the spirit as a weapon of the chase. The Bushman clearly believed that with a bow he could not only kill game but project his wishes and exercise his influence at a great distance from himself. Our history has recorded only the destructive aspects of the bow, namely, the Bushman's belief that with its magic he could kill from a safe distance all that stood between him and his wishes. History has called it ‘The Bushman's Revolver' and given no hint that it had also a gentler mission. Here at the sip-wells we found that the Bushman made also a special bow, a ‘love-bow', as much an instrument of love between men and women as Cupid's bow was in the affairs of gods and ancient heroes. A Bushman, in love, carved a tiny little bow and arrow out of a sliver of the bone of a gemsbok, a great and noble animal with a lovely sweep of long crescent horn on its proud head. The bow was most beautifully made, about three inches long and matched with tiny arrows made out of stems of a sturdy grass that grew near water. The minute quiver was made from the quill of a giant bustard, the largest flying bird in the desert. The Bushman would stain the head of his arrows with a special potion and set out to stalk the lady of his choice. When he had done this sucessfully he would then shoot an arrow into her rump. If, on impact, she pulled out and destroyed the arrow, it was a sign that his courtship had failed. If she kept it intact then it was proof that he had succeeded.

When I heard this I was most anxious to film the scene, but we immediately encountered difficulties that at first seemed insuperable. The Bushmen were frankly afraid of the idea, but after living with it for a day or two they seemed prepared to attempt it. Unfortunately, the most beautiful Bushman girl had got married just before our arrival. Yet Duncan was most anxious she and Nxou should act the parts together. It was not difficult to explain what we wanted because of their own games and make-belief. We talked first, of course, to the girl and her husband. They thought it over for days, and then the man said shyly that she would be allowed to play the part. We then asked Nxou to play the husband, but for the first time he looked angry with us. Over and over again Dabe explained patiently that it would be sheer make-belief. Nxou appeared incapable of drawing the distinction and resolutely refused the part. In the end everyone began to get angry accusing him of ‘stupidity' and ‘ingratitude', but I was touched by his obvious signs of deep conflict.

‘Enough, Dabe,' I said. ‘Ask him why he won't do it. Tell him I'd be grateful to know.'

Relieved, Nxou turned his back on the others to say almost pleadingly to me: ‘Look! That man is my friend. I have known him all my life. Although he says he does not mind, I know his heart will be hurt to see his woman pretending to be mine.'

He stood there resolute, naked, his skin stained with dust and the blood of many an animal, a smell upon him that was too strong for most civilized noses but he was to me, at that moment, truly clothed in manly value and delicacy.

I turned to Duncan. ‘There! He won't even pretend to be in love with his friend's wife! Take off your hat to him, all of you!'

So we chose a secondary star for our film. Successful as it has been in the outside world the scene still seems to me to be a reluctant and self-conscious affair, and I'm not at all certain I was right to inflict even that little unreality upon them.

In those days, too, with the first rain still falling, I heard new music. The plucked sound of the lyre met me one twilight evening as I walked towards the Bushman shelters, and a woman sang to this effect:

Suddenly, from somewhere out of sight, a man heard the song and his whole male being knew the reply. With tenderness that I know in no other primitive singing, he sang back: