The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

  The Bushmen, who walk distances across the Kalahari, have no idea of the soul’s survival in another world. ‘When we die, we die,’ they say. ‘The wind blows away our foot prints, and that is the end of us.’

  Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians – with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds – project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.

  London, 1965

  The man who came to supper with Mr Rasikh was a scrubbed and balding Englishman, pink as a healthy baby and in his middle sixties. He had sandy-to-greying sideburns and clear blue eyes. His name was Alan Brady. You could tell at a glance he was a very happy man.

  Mr Rasikh was the official buyer in London for the Sudanese government. He lived in a flat on top of a tower block in Victoria. He had a hennaed beard, and wore white jalabiyas and a floppy white turban. He was never off the phone collecting punters’ tips for horses, and apparently never went out. Occasionally, you heard the sound of his women in another room.

  His friend Brady was a travelling salesman for a firm that made typewriters and office equipment. He had customers in about thirty African countries and, every four months, would visit each in turn.

  He said he preferred the company of Africans to white men. It was a pleasure to do business with them. People said Africans were impossible to deal with, always wanting something for nothing.

  ‘But, let me tell you,’ Brady said to me, ‘they’re a whole lot easier than my colleagues in the office.’

  In twenty years of trading, he had had two bad debts. He never took a holiday. He was unafraid of revolutions, or African airlines.

  He came to London three times a year, never for more than a week, and would stay in the bunk-room the company set aside for its travellers. Because he had no winter clothes, he tried to time these visits to avoid the worst of the weather: in November, in March and again in July.

  Apart from the clothes he stood up in, he owned no possessions other than a spare tropical suit, a spare tie, a pullover, three shirts, underwear, socks, slippers, an umbrella and a sponge-bag. Everything fitted into a suitcase he could carry as hand-baggage.

  ‘I don’t believe in wasting time at airports,’ he said.

  Every time he returned to London, he went to a tropical outfitter’s off Piccadilly and completely re-equipped himself: suitcase, umbrella, clothes and all. He gave the rejects to the office porter, who made a few pounds on them.

  ‘Nothing’, he said proudly, ‘wears out on Alan Brady.’

  He had neither English friends, nor family. Mr Rasikh’s flat was the one place in London where he felt at ease.

  His father had been gassed on the Somme, his mother had died during the week of Dunkirk. Sometimes, in the summers, he used to visit her grave, in a village churchyard near Nottingham. He had once had an aunt in Wigan, but now she too had died.

  He was past retiring age. There were murmurings among the office staff that it was time for him to go: but his order book was always full, and the management kept him on.

  ‘Don’t you have a base?’ I asked him. ‘Don’t you have anywhere you could call “home”?’

  He blushed with embarrassment. ‘I do,’ he faltered. ‘It is rather private.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Not that I’m ashamed of it,’ he went on. ‘Only some people might think it silly.’

  ‘Not me,’ I said.

  He said that, in the office safe, he kept an old solicitor’s black tin deed box, the kind with ‘The Estate of Sir Somebody So-and-So’ in white lettering.

  Whenever he came to London, he would lock himself in the bunk-room and spread the contents over the mattress.

  In the bottom of the box he kept the bric-à-brac salvaged from an earlier existence: his parents’ wedding photo; his father’s medals; the letter from the King; a teddy bear; a Dresden kingfisher that had been his mother’s favourite; her garnet brooch; his swimming trophy (by 1928, he no longer had attacks of bronchial asthma); his silver ashtray ‘for twenty-five years’ loyal service’ to the firm.

  In the top half of the box, separated by a layer of tissue paper, he kept his ‘African’ things – worthless things, each the record of a memorable encounter: a Zulu carving bought off a sad old man in the Drakensbergs; an iron snake from Dahomey; a print of the Prophet’s Horse, or a letter from a boy in Burundi thanking him for the present of a football. Each time he brought back one new thing, and chucked out one old thing that had lost its significance.

  Alan Brady had only one fear: that soon they would make him retire.

  If every newborn baby has an appetite for forward motion, the next step is to find out why it hates lying still.

  Penetrating further into the causes of anxiety and anger in the very young, Dr Bowlby concluded that the complex instinctual bond between a mother and her child – the child’s screams of alarm (quite different to the whimperings of cold or hunger or sickness); the mother’s ‘uncanny’ ability to hear those screams; the child’s fear of the dark, and of strangers; its terror of rapidly approaching objects; its invention of nightmarish monsters where none exist; in short, all those ‘puzzling phobias’ which Freud sought to explain but failed, could, in fact, be explained by the constant presence of predators in the primaeval home of man.

  Bowlby quotes from William James’s Principles of Psychology, ‘The greatest source of terror in childhood is solitude.’ A solitary child, kicking and yelling in its cot, is not, therefore, necessarily showing the first signs of the Death Wish, or of the Will to Power, or of an ‘aggressive drive’ to bash its brother’s teeth in. These may or may not develop later. No. The child is yelling – if you transpose the cot on to the African thornscrub – because, unless the mother comes back in a couple of minutes, a hyena will have got it.

  Every child appears to have an innate mental picture of the ‘thing’ that might attack: so much so that any threatening ‘thing’, even if it is not the real ‘thing’, will trigger off a predictable sequence of defensive behaviour. The screams and kicks are the first line of defence. The mother must then be prepared to fight for the child; and the father to fight for them both. The danger doubles at night, because man has no night vision and the big cats hunt at night. And surely this most Manichaean drama – of light, darkness and the Beast – lies at the heart of the human predicament.

  Visitors to a baby ward in hospital are often surprised by the silence. Yet if the mother really has abandoned her child, its only chance of survival is to shut its mouth.

  33

  AS PROMISED, RED Lawson drove into Cullen to look for the missing grader. He came in the police vehicle; and to impress on the Cullen Mob the seriousness of his intentions, he was fully togged up, in khaki, with all the insignia of his rank and a hat strapped purposefully under his chin. His socks were stretched to bursting over his calves.

  In the afternoon he made a round of the humpies, but drew a blank. No one had heard of the grader. No one knew what a grader was: except for Clarence the Chairman, who flew into a rage and said he’d confused Cullen with some place else. Even Joshua acted dumb.

  ‘Now what?’ Red asked Rolf.

  He was sitting on a packing-case inside the store, mopping the sweat from his forehead.

  ‘Let’s wait for old Alex,’ said Rolf. ‘He’ll know. And from what I know of him, he’ll hate the grader and want it out.’

  Alex, as usual, was bush walking but was bound to be back at sunset – and he was.

  ‘Leave this one to me,’ said Rolf, who went over to talk to him.

  Alex listened. Then, with the faintest grin, he pointed a bony finger towards the north-east.

  Red’s passion for Spinoza began to make better sense at supper when he told us that his mother was an Amsterdam Jewess. She, alone of her family, had survived the Nazi occupation, cooped in the attic of some Gentile neighbours. When the brutes had gone and she was free to walk the streets, sh
e had the sensation she must either die – or go far away. She met an Australian soldier, who was kind to her and asked her to be his wife.

  Red was aching to talk about Spinoza, but to my shame, I’d only dipped into The Ethics and our conversation was a series of halting non sequiturs. My performance, plainly, was not a patch on Arkady’s.

  Next morning Red and I, and a man he’d brought from Popanji, set out to look for the grader. We crawled across country in the direction Alex had pointed. Whenever we came to higher ground, Red would stop and reach for his binoculars.

  ‘Not a sign of the bugger!’ he said.

  We then drove through a gap between two low-lying hills: on the far side we shouted simultaneously, ‘Grader tracks!’

  They had been having fun! For miles ahead the landscape was churned up into circles, loops and figures of eight. But no matter how many times we drove round this ridiculous maze, there was still no sign of the grader.

  ‘I think I’m going crazy,’ said Red.

  At that moment I glanced at a conical hillock to our right. Perched on top of it was the huge yellow thing.

  ‘Look!’ I shouted.

  ‘Christ!’ said Red. ‘How the hell did they get it up there?’

  We climbed the hill and found the grader, rusty, paint peeling in slabs, a bush growing up through the engine, poised with one wheel in the air, above a very steep bank. Incredibly, the tyres were hard.

  Red checked the tank, which was half-full. He checked the self-starter, which was out. He then checked the slope to make sure there were no hidden dangers, and reckoned we could probably jump-start her.

  ‘Clever so-and-sos,’ he grinned. ‘Knew exactly what they were doing!’

  The metal of the machine was infernally hot. Red presented me with a pair of heat-resistant gloves and a spray-can. My role in this operation was, without etherising myself, to spray ether into the carburettor.

  I wrapped a handkerchief round my nose. Red climbed into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Ready?’ he called.

  ‘Ready!’ I answered.

  He released the brake and the grader eased forward with a swish of breaking branches. I pressed the nozzle of the spray-can and hung on for dear life as, suddenly, we hurtled down the slope and the engine came alive with a roar. Red skilfully steered the machine on to level ground, and braked. He turned to me and gave the thumbs up sign.

  He ordered the man from Popanji to take the wheel of the police vehicle. I rode behind on the cab of the grader. Within a mile or so of Cullen, I shouted above the din, ‘Could you do me a big favour? Could I drive her?’

  ‘Sure!’ said Red.

  I drove the grader into the settlement. There was no one about. I parked on a slope behind Rolf’s caravan.

  Now, if I saw the ‘other’ Bruce in Alice, I’d be able to say, ‘I didn’t drive a dozer, Bru. But I drove a grader.’

  NO COUNTRY ABOUNDS in a greater degree with dangerous beasts than Southern Africa.

  Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

  But where there is danger there grows also what saves.

  Friedrich Hölderlin, Patmos

  Koestler’s rant about the original ‘bloodbath’ made me realise he must have read, at first- or second-hand, the work of Raymond Dart. Dart was the young Professor of Anatomy of Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg who, in 1924, had recognised the significance of the Taung Child – a spectacular fossil skull from Cape Province – and had gone on to give it the tongue-twisting name Australopithecus africanus, the ‘African Southern Ape’.

  He deduced, correctly, that the creature had stood about four foot high; that it had walked erect, more or less like a man; and though the brain of a fully grown specimen could hardly have been larger than a chimpanzee’s, it had human characteristics none the less.

  The discovery of this ‘missing link’, he insisted (to the sneers of ‘experts’ in England), bore out Darwin’s prediction that man had descended from the higher apes in Africa.

  He also believed the ‘child’ had been bashed to death with a blow over the head.

  Dart, a Queenslander of bush-farming stock, belongs to the generation of the First World War; and though he only witnessed mopping-up operations in 1918, he seems to have held the disillusioned view: that men enjoy killing other men, and will go on killing indefinitely.

  Certainly, by 1953, with fresh evidence from a cave on the fringe of the Kalahari, he felt compelled – in a paper entitled ‘The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man’ – to share his belief that our species had emerged from its simian background because we were killers and cannibals; that the Weapon had fathered the Man; that all subsequent history revolved around the possession and development of superior weapons; and that, by implication, men must adjust their society to its weapons rather than weapons to the needs of society.

  Dart’s disciple, Robert Ardrey, was moved to rank the paper alongside The Communist Manifesto in its long-term effects on ideology.

  In 1947–8, while excavating the Makapansgat Limeworks Cave – itself an eerie place where the Voortrekkers once massacred a tribe of Bantus – Dart had uncovered what he took to be the ‘kitchen midden’ of a band of Australopithecines, who, ‘like Nimrod long after them’, had been mighty hunters.

  Although they had eaten eggs, crabs, lizards, rodents and birds, they had also butchered antelopes in quantity, to say nothing of far larger mammals: a giraffe, a cave bear, the hippo, the rhino, the elephant, the lion, two kinds of hyena – in addition to which, mixed up among the 7,000-odd bones, were a lot of baboon skulls minus the skeletons, and the remains of a cannibal feast.

  From the fossils Dart selected one particular specimen: ‘the fractured lower jaw of a 12-year-old son of a man-like ape’:

  The lad had been killed by a violent blow delivered with great accuracy on the point of the chin. The bludgeon blow was so vicious that it had shattered the jaw on both sides of the face and knocked out all the front teeth. That dramatic specimen impelled me in 1948 and the seven years following to study further their murderous and cannibalistic way of life.

  Which he did. He began by comparing the bone assemblage from Makapansgat with those of Taung and Sterkfontein (the latter, a cave site near Pretoria); and between 1949 and 1965 he published a total of thirty-nine papers elaborating his theory of an Osteodontokeratic (bone-tooth-horn) tool culture for Australopithecus.

  The picture he drew of our immediate ancestors revealed them to have been right-handed; that their favourite weapon had been a bludgeon made from the distal end of an antelope humerus; that for daggers they had used horns or slivers of sharpened bone, for saws jawbones, for picks the canine teeth of carnivores; and that a mass of other bones had been smashed for the extraction of marrow.

  Noticing, too, that the tail vertebrae were almost invariably missing, Dart suggested these had been waved about as flails or whips or signalling flags. Also, because the skulls of both baboon and Australopithecus appeared to have been deliberately mutilated, he suggested the occupants of the cave had been ‘professional head-hunters’. He concluded:

  The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history, from the earliest Egyptian or Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War, accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices or their substitutes in formalised religion and worldwide scalping, head hunting, body mutilating and necrophilic practices in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator, this predaceous habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest carnivora.

  The style alone suggests that something is seriously wrong.

  Berkeley, California, 1969

  In the People’s Park, I was buttonholed by a hippie, prematurely aged.

  ‘Stop the killing!’ he said. ‘Stop the killing!’

  ‘You wouldn’t by any chance’, I said, ‘think of telling a tiger to chew cud?’

&n
bsp; I got up, ready to run for it.

  ‘Shit!’ he shouted.

  ‘Think of Hitler!’ I shouted back. ‘Think of Rudolph Hess! Always snooping in each other’s vegie picnic-baskets.’

  The number of murders committed during Lent is greater, I am told, than at any other time of the year. A man under the influence of a bean dietary (for this is the principal food of the Greeks during their fasts) will be in an apt humour for enriching the shrine of his Saint, and passing a knife through his next-door neighbour.

  A. W. Kinglake, Eothen

  Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, 1983

  Professor Raymond Dart’s ninetieth birthday party in the Department of Anatomy. The old man was swinging about a haematite dumb-bell with which he hoped to keep his frontal lobes in shape. In a clangorous voice, he explained how to be right-handed was to be left-brained: yet if you exercised both hands equally, you exercised both halves of the brain.

  Two black students dipped their biscuits delicately in their tea cups, and giggled.

  After the party, two of Dart’s junior colleagues took me along the passage to see the Taung Child. What an object! You had the impression of a very wise little person staring at you down the ages through a pair of binoculars.

  The damage to the skull, they said, had nothing to do with violence. Before fossilisation, it had simply been squashed by the compacting layers of breccia.

  They also allowed me to handle the boy’s ‘broken jaw’ from Makapansgat. It was greyish-black, not from being cooked but from magnesium staining. Again, they said, the damage can only have been caused by ‘shearing’, as a result of subsidence in the strata.

  So much for the barrage of nonsense raised on the evidence of these two specimens.

  Swartkrans, Transvaal