by John Buchan
‘He won’t take cold?’ the girl asked anxiously. ‘Aunt Anne used to say he had a weak chest.’
‘Not on your life,’ said one of my assailants. ‘He’s as strong as a jack rabbit. You take the flask, Miss Cis, and give him a drink before you cut loose. He will be as warm as a woodchuck under that big coat, and his being wet won’t signify. Guess you’d better hurry if you are to be back in time.’
I sat, or rather reclined, on the step of the car, utterly unable to speak a word. My mind was just beginning to work, and I realised that I must be on Glenclee ground, and that these must be some of the Glenclee party. I had heard that Americans had taken the place. Apparently they took me for one of themselves, who had become justly unpopular and had got chucked into the river, and now they wanted to get me away to prevent further unpleasantness. One dripping figure in the darkness is very like another, and probably I was about Master Bobby’s height. I made a tremendous effort to explain, but your explanatory style is cramped if your arms are tied to your side and you have a large-sized gag between your teeth. Then I struggled, but all that happened was that I was bundled inside the car, and the next moment it had started.
I could see dimly that the young man was driving and that the girl sat beside him. It was masterly driving, for as soon as we got out of the narrow riverside roads on to a decent highway we fairly ate up the miles. It was a clear night, and presently there was a moon, and through the windows I could see the hills fall back, and the glen open to a strath, and the strath to a plain. We raced in the open, slowed down at the villages, and twice crawled through the streets of little towns, and all the while I sat in my sopping clothes, kept fairly warm by the enveloping ulster, and tried to collect my disordered wits.
Bewilderment had been succeeded by wrath, and wrath by annoyance, and this in the end by amusement. I had certainly been landed in a preposterous comedy... I wondered how I should tell the story at Inverclee. To be taken for an unpleasant young American, who had got to be kidnapped and removed in the public interest, is not exactly flattering... And then the salmon! If I had only got that fish I might have faced my destiny with comfort. My captors seemed rather nice young people. I saw the girl’s slim figure silhouetted against the glow of the headlights, and I remembered how kind her eyes had been, and how tragic her face. Was she Bobby’s sister? I felt very angry with Bobby, and hoped the worst for him.
Then, wet and all, I think I must have become drowsy, for I know that when we stopped I wakened with a start. We seemed to be in the environs of a city, for there were lamps on the sidewalk. The door opened and the girl came in beside me.
‘Oh, Bawby, you’ve been such a worry,’ she said. ‘Promise me you will be good now. You have got to go to an hotel and have a hot bath and go to bed. There’s a trolley-car at the end of this street. I am going to send a wire to Mr Jephcote that you have been called away on important business. Charlie won’t say anything, and Sid and John will back me up. I will see that your baggage is sent to Jermyn Street, and you have got to go back to London to-morrow, and not stir till I see you again. We are serious, Bawby! We have got the credit of the family to think about. I am putting this wad of bills in your pocket, so you won’t be short of money.’
She cut the cord which tied my hands, and then with her delicate fingers she unloosed the gag. I noticed that the young man who drove had come to the door to see that Bobby behaved himself. It was pretty dark there, but I had the impression of an extraordinarily pretty girl.
‘I am not Bobby,’ I said, as soon as my lips would work. ‘You’ve carried off the wrong man. I am a guest at Inverclee, and I fell into the river when I was trying to tail a salmon. You’ve removed me about fifty miles from my dinner!’
There was utter silence, and then the girl found her voice. ‘Where is Bobby?’ she cried.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I hope he is in the river! I expect he is safe at home dining. You must hurry back if you want to prevent him making further mischief.’
Then she began to laugh — a delightful performance, beginning with a melodious chuckle and ending with streaming eyes.
‘We can’t apologise,’ she stammered. ‘It is too big and too bad. But we will come over to Inverclee to-morrow covered with sackcloth and ashes!’
‘I wish you would ring up my hostess when you get back,’ I said, ‘and tell her I have missed my train and will arrive to-morrow.’
‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked. ‘Won’t you come back with us?’
‘Not for worlds,’ I said; ‘I am very tired and very hungry. Here’s your wad of notes for Bobby. I am going to the Western Hotel, where I know the manager, and I am going to bath, and sup in my bedroom, and sleep... No, I have plenty of money. If you like you can give me a drink from that flask of yours to keep off chills, and perhaps you could find me a cigarette. My pouch is soaking.’
We parted very good friends, the girl still laughing. I think the fiasco had taken for her the edge off Bobby’s misdeeds. I found a tramcar, and then a taxi, and was presently set down at the Western Hotel. I had once acted for the company in a big lawsuit, and I knew the manager, so when I interviewed him in his office the path was made smooth for me. He lent me pyjamas and things, and himself conducted me to my room.
As he had his key in the lock the adjacent door opened, and out of it popped the head and arms of old Alderson, who was depositing his boots on the mat. As his eye fell on me, even his stalwart equanimity was shaken. I must have looked a figure of fun — my neat flannel suit soaked and shapeless, my hair on end, my face scratched and haggard. He stared at me in a kind of ecstasy.
‘Nemesis,’ he murmured, in a quotation which I recognised. ‘Hotfoot upon pride follows Nemesis the Avenger!’
The Green Wildebeest
Pall Mall Magazine, 1927
We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE: Religio Medici
JUST AFTER THE Boer War I was on a prospecting job in the northeastern Transvaal. I was a mining engineer, with copper as my speciality, and I had always a notion that copper might be found in big quantities in the Zoutpansberg foothills. There was of course Messina at the west end, but my thoughts turned rather to the north-east corner, where the berg breaks down to the crook of the Limpopo. I was a young man then, fresh from two years’ campaigning with the Imperial Light Horse, and I was thirsty for better jobs than trying to drive elusive burghers up against barbed wire and blockhouses. When I started out with my mules from Pietersburg on the dusty road to the hills, I think I felt happier than ever before in my life.
I had only one white companion, a boy of twenty-two called Andrew Du Preez. Andrew, not Andries, for he was named after the Reverend Andrew Murray, who had been a great Pope among the devout Afrikanders. He came of a rich Free State farming family, but his particular branch had been settled for two generations in the Wakkerstroom region along the upper Pongola. The father was a splendid old fellow with a head like Moses, and he and all the uncles had been on commando, and most of them had had a spell in Bermuda or Ceylon. The boy was a bit of a freak in that stock. He had been precociously intelligent, and had gone to a good school in the Cape and afterwards to a technical college in Johannesburg. He was as modern a product as the others were survivals, with none of the family religion or family politics, very keen on science, determined to push his way on the Rand — which was the Mecca of all enterprising Afrikanders - and not very sorry that the war should have found him in a place from which it was manifestly impossible to join the family banner. In October’99 he was on his first job in a new mining area in Rhodesia, and as he hadn’t much health he was wise enough to stick there till peace came.
I had known him before, and when I ran across him on the Rand I asked him to come with me, and he jumped at the offer. He had just returned from the Wakkerstroom farm, to which the rest of his clan had been repatriated, and didn’t relish the prospect of livin
g in a tin-roofed shanty with a father who read the Bible most of the day to find out why exactly he had merited such misfortunes. Andrew was a hard young sceptic, in whom the family piety produced acute exasperation... He was a good-looking boy, always rather smartly dressed, and at first sight you would have taken him for a young American, because of his heavy hairless chin, his dull complexion, and the way he peppered his ordinary speech with technical and business phrases. There was a touch of the Mongol in his face, which was broad, with high cheekbones, eyes slightly slanted, short thick nose and rather full lips. I remembered that I had seen the same thing before in young Boers, and I thought I knew the reason. The Du Preez family had lived for generations close up to the Kaffir borders, and somewhere had got a dash of the tar-brush.
We had a light wagon with a team of eight mules, and a Cape-cart drawn by four others; five boys went with us, two of them Shangaans, and three Basutos from Malietsie’s location north of Pietersburg. Our road was over the Wood Bush, and then north-east across the two Letabas to the Pufuri river. The countryside was amazingly empty. Beyer’s commandos had skirmished among the hills, but the war had never reached the plains; at the same time it had put a stop to all hunting and prospecting and had scattered most of the native tribes. The place had become in effect a sanctuary, and I saw more varieties of game than I had ever seen before south of the Zambesi, so that I wished I were on a hunting trip instead of on a business job. Lions were plentiful, and every night we had to build a scherm for our mules and light great fires, beside which we listened to their eerie serenades.
It was early December, and in the Wood Bush it was the weather of an English June. Even in the foothills, among the wormwood and wild bananas, it was pleasant enough, but when we got out into the plains it was as hot as Tophet. As far as the eye could reach the bush veld rolled its scrub like the scrawled foliage a child draws on a slate, with here and there a baobab swimming unsteadily in the glare. For long stretches we were away from water, and ceased to see big game — only Kaffir queens and tick-birds, and now and then a wild ostrich. Then on the sixth day out from Pietersburg we raised a blue line of mountains on the north, which I knew to be the eastern extension of the Zoutpansberg. I had never travelled this country before, and had never met a man who had, so we steered by compass, and by one of the old bad maps of the Transvaal Government. That night we crossed the Pufuri, and next day the landscape began to change. The ground rose, so that we had a sight of the distant Lebombo hills to the east, and mopani bushes began to appear — a sure sign of a healthier country.
That afternoon we were only a mile or two from the hills. They were the usual type of berg which you find everywhere from Natal to the Zambesi — cut sheer, with an overhang in many places, but much broken up by kloofs and fissures. What puzzled me was the absence of streams. The ground was as baked as the plains, all covered with aloe and cactus and thorn, with never a sign of water. But for my purpose the place looked promising. There was that unpleasant metallic green that you find in a copper country, so that everything seemed to have been steeped in a mineral dye — even the brace of doves which I shot for luncheon.
We turned east along the foot of the cliffs, and presently saw a curious feature. A promontory ran out from the berg, connected by a narrow isthmus with the main massif. I suppose the superficial area of the top might have been a square mile or so; the little peninsula was deeply cut into by ravines, and in the ravines tall timber was growing. Also we came to well-grassed slopes, dotted with mimosa and syringa bushes. This must mean water at last, for I had never found yellow-woods and stinkwoods growing far from a stream. Here was our outspan for the night, and when presently we rounded a corner and looked down into a green cup I thought I had rarely seen a more habitable place. The sight of fresh green herbage always intoxicated me, after the dust and heat and the ugly greys and umbers of the bushveld. There was a biggish kraal in the bottom, and a lot of goats and leggy Kaffir sheep on the slopes. Children were bringing in the cows for the milking, smoke was going up from the cooking fires, and there was a cheerful evening hum in the air. I expected a stream, but could see no sign of one: the cup seemed to be as dry as a hollow of the Sussex Downs. Also, though there were patches of mealies and Kaffir corn, I could see no irrigated land. But water must be there, and after we had fixed a spot for our outspan beside a clump of olivewoods, I took Andrew and one of our boys and strolled down to make inquiries.
I daresay many of the inhabitants of that kraal had never seen a white man before, for our arrival made a bit of a sensation. I noticed that there were very few young men about the place, but an inordinate number of old women. The first sight of us scattered them like plovers, and we had to wait for half an hour, smoking patiently in the evening sun, before we could get into talk with them. Once the ice was broken, however, things went well. They were a decent peaceable folk, very shy and scared and hesitating, but with no guile in them. Our presents of brass and copper wire and a few tins of preserved meat made a tremendous impression. We bought a sheep from them at a ridiculously small price, and they threw in a basket of green mealies. But when we raised the water question we struck a snag.
There was water, good water, they said, but it was not in any pan or stream. They got it morning and evening from up there — and they pointed to the fringe of a wood under the cliffs where I thought I saw the roof of a biggish rondavel. They got it from their Father; they were Shangaans, and the word they used was not the ordinary word for chief, but the name for a great priest and medicine-man.
I wanted my dinner, so I forbore to inquire further. I produced some more Kaffir track, and begged them to present it with my compliments to their Father, and to ask for water for two white strangers, five of their own race, and twelve mules. They seemed to welcome the proposition, and a string of them promptly set off uphill with their big calabashes. As we walked back I said something foolish to Andrew about having struck a Kaffir Moses who could draw water from the rock. The lad was in a bad temper. ‘We have struck an infernal rascal who has made a corner in the water supply and bleeds these poor devils. He’s the kind of grafter I would like to interview with a sjambok.’
In an hour we had all the water we wanted. It stood in a row of calabashes, and beside it the presents I had sent to the provider. The villagers had deposited it and then vanished, and our boys who had helped them to carry it were curiously quiet and solemnised. I was informed that the Father sent the water as a gift to the strangers without payment. I tried to cross-examine one of our Shangaans, but he would tell me nothing except that the water had come from a sacred place into which no man could penetrate. He also muttered something about a wildebeest which I couldn’t understand. Now the Kaffir is the most superstitious of God’s creatures. All the way from Pietersburg we had been troubled by the vivid imaginations of our outfit. They wouldn’t sleep in one place because of a woman without a head who haunted it; they dared not go a yard along a particular road after dark because of a spook that travelled it in the shape of a rolling ball of fire. Usually their memories were as short as their fancies were quick, and five minutes after their protest they would be laughing like baboons. But that night they seemed to have been really impressed by something. They did not chatter or sing over their supper, but gossiped in undertones, and slept as near Andrew and myself as they dared.
Next morning the same array of gourds stood before our outspan, and there was enough water for me to have a tub in my collapsible bath. I don’t think I ever felt anything colder.
I had decided to take a holiday and go shooting. Andrew would stay in camp and tinker up one of the wheels of the mule-wagon which had suffered from the bush roads. He announced his intention of taking a walk later and interviewing the water-merchant.
‘For Heaven’s sake, be careful,’ I said. ‘Most likely he’s a priest of sorts, and if you’re not civil to him we’ll have to quit this country. I make a point of respecting the gods of the heathen.’
‘All you English d
o,’ he replied tartly. ‘That’s why you make such a damned mess of handling Kaffirs... But this fellow is a business man with a pretty notion of cornering public utilities. I’m going to make his acquaintance.’
I had a pleasant day in that hot scented wilderness. First I tried the low ground, but found nothing there but some old spoor of kudu, and a paauw which I shot. Then I tried the skirts of the berg to the east of the village, and found that the kloofs, which from below looked climbable, had all somewhere a confounded overhang which checked me. I saw no way of getting to the top of the plateau, so I spent the afternoon in exploring the tumbled glacis. There was no trace of copper here, for the rock was a reddish granite, but it was a jolly flowery place, with green dells among the crags, and an amazing variety of birds. But I was glad that I had brought a water-bottle, for I found no water; it was there all right, but it was underground. I stalked a bushbuck ram and missed him, but I got one of the little buck like chamois which the Dutch call klipspringer. With it and the paauw strung round my neck I sauntered back leisurely to supper.
As soon as I came in sight of the village I saw that something had played the deuce with it. There was a great hubbub going on, and all the folk were collected at the end farthest away from our camp. The camp itself looked very silent. I could see the hobbled mules, but I could see nothing of any of our outfit. I thought it best in these circumstances to make an inconspicuous arrival, so I bore away to my left, crossed the hollow lower down where it was thick with scrub, and came in on the outspan from the south. It was very silent. The cooking fires had been allowed to go out, though the boys should have been getting ready the evening meal, and there seemed to be not a single black face on the premises. Very uneasy, I made for our sleeping tent, and found Andrew lying on his bed, smoking.