by Guy Butler
That business about the full moon made some people laugh, but Romulus and Remus had a wonderfully convincing answer. Did we or didn’t we believe that the moon affected the tides? If we didn’t, they invited us to go to Port Alfred to see for ourselves. Well and good. If the moon moved the sea waters, why shouldn’t it move the waters beneath the earth? No one could answer that.
You couldn’t fault them. They had it all worked out, even to an old pistol and Very lights which they fired off as soon as they’d made their fix. The farmer would have to sit up on his stoep and wait for the signal, and then go with a ‘boy’ in his buggy, and knock an iron standard on the spot, and fetch them home for a couple of identical dop-en-dams.
The Eastern Cape south of the Winterberg is like a sieve with Pennyfeather boreholes. Some say they have let all the underground water out. It drains away when the moon is dark, when the tidal waters under the earth are at their lowest, emptying ebb.
Experts reckon that one in twenty people can dowse if they want to. I know the daughter of a dowser who tested herself by walking with a stick across their lawn over the water mains, without results. Then her father took her by the hand and gave her one end of the fork for her free hand, while he held the other. Then they walked together across the buried pipe. She felt the stick pull down. She could not resist it.
Across our country are people with this gift, some of whom use it most unprofessionally. There was an ex-Luftwaffe pilot in the old Rhodesia who got lost in his Junkers over the Matopos; so he asked a granny who was busy knitting for an expected male grand-child for the loan of her two needles (which were held together at one end by an embryonic blue bootie), and did a bit of divining with them, and brought us all safely back to Bulawayo.
A tantalising case is that of a Catholic Priest at Oranjemund. There was a devout young couple there whose marriage was not going at all well. Both suffered from insomnia, which gave them time to worry too much about themselves and each other. So they asked the Father round to discuss their difficulties. They’d both made a long list of their points of difference, and hoped he’d act as arbiter. But as soon as they started he held up his hand for silence and said: ‘I doubt if it’s the fault of either of ye. Do ye mind if I just do a few little tests?’
And he produced a small, freshly cut dowsing stick from his pocket, and walked across the room. The stick indicated a strong underground stream under the new ‘edge to edge’.
‘Now show me your kitchen’, he said.
There was another stream there, under the Novilon, more or less at right angles to the one in the dining room.
‘Where’s your bedroom?’ he asked.
The two underground streams crossed right under their double bed, apparently emitting all sorts of infernal influences.
‘Now you just move your bed against the other wall, and you’ll miss the wicked water cross altogether. I’m sure you’ll sleep fine now.’
They did as he said and lived happily ever after. Well, until the kids started arriving. But that’s another story.
But what a wonderful gift that priest had! All ministers of religion should be tested to see if they have the dowsing gift. Think of the marriages they’d save, and with so little fuss. But it won’t be done. Never. And why? Because dowsing is not quite respectable, is it? I mean, there’s always a question mark hanging over it. It seldom gets dignified by a public debate. Respectable people will call in a dowser, or even dowse themselves, but won’t take it quite seriously. So it’s memorable when it is brought right into the public arena, as happened in my matric year.
The dorp had an enterprising library committee who believed in the spoken as well as the written word; so they arranged monthly lectures, ‘so that they themselves could get on their hind legs’ said some unkind people. This was not quite fair. For instance, they invited a Professor Fountain to talk on the geology of the Karoo. He was brilliant, about rock strata, igneous formations and weathering. The trouble blew up in question time, about underground water, and how to find it. He was so rude. He didn’t have one good word to say for water diviners. Most of them were outright charlatans, he said, who played on the credulity of ignorant farmers, who, in times of drought, poor fellows, would grab at any silly old straw in their search for water. Others, perhaps, might deceive themselves into believing that the stick in their hands turned down of its own accord and not in response to the added pressure in their fists. It was all rank superstition and utterly unscientific. He had no doubt whatever that some looked carefully at the lie of the land; that they knew that ironstone did not hold water like sandstone; and that a dolerite dyke could create an underground reservoir of water. Any intelligent man could draw quite logical conclusions from the rock formations visible on the surface or in the beds of streams; there was no need for them to call in extra-sensory perception or telepathy or other mystical mumbo-jumbo. There was absolutely no way whatever in which non-existent emanations or rays could make a twig of willow or any other water-loving plant turn down over an underground stream. Rubbish. Old Wives’ Tales. And he’d bluntly refused to give weight to the evidence of hard-headed leading farmers, whose wool clips came to ten times his salary, who were prepared to vouch for the success of water diviners.
‘There’s underground water everywhere’, he shrugged, ‘at some depth or other.’
I was now doing a little physics at school, and was inclined to be impressed by Professors. But the very next meeting at the Library was addressed by a retired ex-Indian army Sapper, Colonel W.K. Leddmerry, O.B.E., Inst.Mec.E. He was a member of the Order of the British Empire, and also a member of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. He was visiting relatives in the dorp who thought Professor Fountain had overstated his case.
The lecture was advertised as ‘Experiences of a Water Dowser in India’. A big crowd attended. His face was very red (from long years of curry eating, said Uncle Danby) and he spoke oddly, ending words with ‘ah’ whenever he could – ‘Wartah Dowsing in Indiah’.
When appointed garrison engineer to a place near Bangalore, he was instructed to expedite the finding of an underground water supply of four hundred thousand gallons per day for a rapidly expanding cantonment.
The country in which he had to bore was as arid and as unpromising as the Karoo. The contractor was drilling on a regular grid with an ancient steam-driven percussion drill which kept breaking down; and, when in order, the crew kept going AWOL. The water-bearing sandstone was hidden somewhere below varying thicknesses of basalt. He saw no end to a hopeless task, and a failed mission on his record. So in desperation he called for a volunteer water diviner from among the crew.
‘A shifty fellah presented himself with a couplah bicycle spokes lashed togethah at one end with electric flex. His hands were slippery with sweat. It was a – ah – performance which no one present – ah – believed in. And when they drilled on the spot which he chose, the supply of wartah was not worth the bothah.’
So he went all the way to Simla for advice from a colleague famous for finding water. His friend introduced him to the whole science of water divining – from elementary things, like holding the stick so that it is in a state of ‘unstable equilibrium’ in one’s hands, to the elaborate, precise use of instruments like the whalebone rod and an ivory pendulum on a silk thread. They worked hard at it for a week.
On his return, he explained it in broad outline to his sceptical men. Then he spent a fortnight walking crisscross across an area of two miles square, surveying it for underground flows. He discovered and plotted a strong stream running north-east to south-east; and another stream below it north-west to south-west. The latter was the stronger stream, and, what’s more, its water was sweeter.
Yes, sweeter. How did he know? The pendulum told him.
That amazed me most: the things the pendulum could tell him when suspended over the centre line of an invisible underground stream – the speed of its gyrations showed the quantity of the water; but if the gyration was counter-clockwis
e, the water was likely to be saline, or otherwise unsuitable.
Anyway, he drilled, and got his four hundred thousand gallons of sweet water, and shortly after, the OBE. That OBE was proof positive to the English speakers in the audience that the Colonel’s opinions were to be preferred to the Professor’s, whose only letters of credit were M.Sc. (Cantab.).
The OBE ended his lecture with some general observations. ‘You must study your chosen method and the various tools you use. You must remember that your instruments can only signal yes or no, and that your questions must be precisely framed – a silly question gets a silly answer. Failures are due to lack of confidence in your methods and ability; also to listening to confusing suggestions from outside; and to the presence of a sceptical audience.’
‘You know’, said Uncle Danby, ‘that advice seems to be generally applicable to any profession on earth.’
‘But what do you think about water divining, Uncle?’ I asked.
‘It’s a risky business’, he said, ‘for the client, and even – sometimes – for the expert.’
‘Have you ever used a water diviner?’
‘I only used one once.’
‘Was he successful?’
‘Well, yes, for me, but not for the diviner. He never risked it again. When he recovered he took to selling life insurance.’
His name was Farquharson, an ex-public school boy who’d stayed behind after the Boer War. Like this Indian Sapper Colonel, he believed in refining his methods. For instance, he’d ask you how strong a stream of water you wanted. He had a sliding scale of fees, you know: so many quid for so many gallons. If you wanted a modest stream he cut a slender willow fork; but the bigger the stream the thicker the fork. Logical, if you come to think of it: it takes more water to bend a thick stick than a thin one.
But I was not so sure. So he cut the usual slender stick, and traversed the camp, and found no less than four possible sites. He then cut a thicker fork and walked the same route. The stick turned down at only three. He then cut a fork from an old taaibos. It responded to only two. To settle between these, he cut an even thicker taaibos fork. It took all the strength to bend it into the proper state of ‘uncertain equilibrium’.
As he walked over the first stream the stick took no notice, but as he crossed the second it turned up and gave him such a violent clout right between the eyes that it laid him out cold among the gannabossies.
Nothing we would do would bring him round, so I put a mattress on the floor of the trap, and drove him into town.
I had plenty of time to think. Why had the stick turned up? Sticks were supposed to turn down. Did it mean that the water was brak? Or artesian? Or maybe not water at all, but oil? OIL?!
They X-rayed his skull. He did have thin bones, but the cranium was not cracked.
The next morning the senior town doctors held a consultation. They came to no conclusion. But a young houseman, new from medical school, buttonholed me, and asked me to repeat the exact circumstances. So I told him. The patient had been walking with a mikstok over what he was sure was a strong stream of water. But instead of the stick turning down, it had swung up and hit him zonk between the eyes.
The smart young fellow smirked, saying: ‘The diagnosis is obvious: a severe case of water on the brain.’
3
The Rebel with a Price on his Head
Petrus Marais was a gaunt, simple man with many of the sad characteristics of a poor white: alternatively miserly and sentimental, exploiting and spoiling his children and grandchildren to gratify his insatiable hungers for power and affection; exploited by them to gratify their insatiable hungers for liquor, new women, and new cars.
It was surprising, then, to find, lurking in this bitter old wreck of what a patriarch should be, the living ghost of a young man from the Boer War, about whom one might some day write a ballad. Here was one of the legendary Cape Rebels who’d joined the guerilla leader, Gideon Scheepers; Scheepers, the twenty-eight-year-old general who had run rings round the British columns in the mountainous Cape Midlands.
Petrus came from a family of nine sons bred on a smallholding at Adendorp. People say that fate gives us three chances, and that the last is a smallholding in Adendorp. There the younger sons of younger sons, or the incompetent, or the luckless, make an undignified last stand against utter destitution.
Jobs, let alone smallholdings, were hard to come by in the 1890s; so most of the Marais boys climbed into the government’s coach: two into the Cape Government Railway, one into the Post Office, another into the Graaff-Reinet Municipality – but tall young Petrus had elected for the Police, who in those days preferred recruits to be six footers: the old Cape Constabulary, a fine body of men all dressed in navy blue serge like British bobbies. They took a special oath to the Old Queen, Victoria, whom most Afrikaners held in great respect, even affection. To begin with all went well. Walking his beat in Aberdeen, Petrus put on weight. But war broke out with the Transvaal and the Free State; and then came Scheepers, yes, Scheepers himself, who could signal with a heliograph, and, when necessary, whip his men into line with the sjambok that always hung from his wrist.
Well, it had not been easy for Petrus to break his oath and decamp, abandoning his handsome dark blues for veld-coloured corduroys. ‘I was young!’ he said simply, ‘I was bored with the Aberdeen beat, I wanted excitement and I was an Afrikaner.’ In the heat of the war he had not considered the consequences of this act of treason.
He did not speak much of skirmishes, or of horses knocking up; but of his terror of Scheepers’ sjambok, and of being caught alive, tried, blindfolded, and executed by firing squad – like Scheepers was in the end; an event he had watched through his binoculars. In the bed of the Sundays River they had executed him, in the mountains north of Graaff-Reinet; his young general-hero, Scheepers, too sick to stand, roped in a chair, shot.
So that when the war stopped, with his status as traitor and Cape Rebel unaltered, and a price on his head, he lit out across the Orange River into German South West. Even when across the river he felt hunted, and kept moving, north. In a remarkably short space of time he found himself right out of South West and far into southern Angola. He had heard of a little colony of Boers there who might welcome him.
He soon became disillusioned in southern Angola. He couldn’t find those Angolan Boers anywhere; the Portuguese officials were not friendly, and, as for the blacks, they expected to be paid for everything, even a simple calabash of milk, and he had nothing to pay with. His horse got fat, while he got thin.
He hung about the German forts in the latitude of the Etosha Pan for a time. Germans were divided into two rigid classes, officers and men, both incomprehensible to him: the officers above him, like little gods, the men below, like little machines. The officers dismissed him as if he were no better than a Bushman or a Berg Damara: and there were no jobs for casual hangers on. The rank and file, friendly enough, soon got tired of sharing their rations with him.
Petrus was not much given to religion, but in these extremities he decided to put his future into the hands of God, or rather, into the hands of his horse. Every morning now, he’d sing a hymn he’d learnt from the Methodists: ‘Guide me, O thou great redeemer, Pilgrim through this barren land’, and then he let the reins hang loose, and allow his horse to choose. And somehow, every morning, the horse’s head pointed south.
Maybe the horse had dreamt that an amnesty had been extended to home-sick rebels. Horses were cleverer than a lot of men he knew. So he travelled hopefully, for several weeks, south, always south – out of the mopani, into the kameeldorings and sand, and then the Karoo-like landscape near Keetmanshoop.
But when he got to the German border post at the pontoon bridge across the Great River, the news was not good. The Germans manning the pontoon – a Corporal and two men – all told the same story: Lord Milner and his friends were adamant: Cape Rebels were traitors, and must be treated as such: no amnesty. There were three other ragged exrebels there, living of
f the land, on a diet of veldkos, dassies and barbels, waiting for that amnesty. They’d only got as far as Windhoek before succumbing to horse sense.
If the news and the diet were bad, the company was congenial. The German corporal and his four men spoke a dialect that was easy to understand. They played simplified bridge: which was an appropriate game to play at one end of a pontoon, which is, after all, a sort of bridge.
Whenever some lucky man, whose papers were in order, came to cross the pontoon, they would take it in turns to help the German soldiers to pull the pontoon across the stream by the cable fixed to the landing stages on either bank. Envious, they would watch their passenger step across the little gap of water on to the sacred soil of the ou Kolonie. And they’d crack bitter jests with Corporal Willem Henegan, a soleman, oathkeeping, loyal member of the Cape Constabulary. He knew them all by name. Wagging a horny forefinger he’d say: ‘I have all your pictures framed all round my hartbeeshuisie walls, with the word WANTED in large letters under each. And I, Henegan, want you, each of you, in person, in prison, not your ugly pictures on my walls.’
They hated him for this last blasphemy. As all decent people knew, photographs had been given to man by God to keep family memories green; and here was this man misusing them for the purposes of political revenge and crime detection. They got as far as planning a little commando raid across the river, to give him a beating, and to steal those pictures of themselves; but just as their plans were ripening, their tormentor, Corporal Willem Henegan, was sent to Pretoria, promoted to Sergeant.