The soup, meat and vegetables that followed, after being heated in the dixies, were still more successful. Even though François gave himself and Nonnie half the amount he gave Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara, the Bushman couple finished long before they did. Finally François fetched the largest piece of biltong from his store while the meat was cooking and squatted, ’Bamuthi-wise, and cut it into chunks. He fed it to Hintza, listening as he did so to Xhabbo telling Nuin-Tara how he had experienced this sort of food before, and so could foretell what other delights were still to come.
Both François and Nonnie were content to leave the talking to them, not only because it made all sound so normal and happy, but also because it helped their spirit to contain the storm of thought and feeling silently raging within them. It was accordingly, using the word in the most relative sense, the best moment as yet of their tragic day, so good that François could not resist, despite a guilty feeling of dangerous extravagance, if not sheer waste, an impulse to make the most of it by taking two enormous tins of peaches from his store. He quietened his conscience with the thought that they could not be carried with them when they left the cave.
Since their dixies were contaminated by the previous courses and he knew they could not yet spare any water for washing them, he pinned on the point of his knife the great halved St. Helena peaches and handed one half at a time to each one there, including Hintza, who had the most un-doglike passion for canned peaches.
The first went to Xhabbo, since Bushman manners demanded that the man be served first. François was amused at the astonishment on his face because this was an eventuality which had not yet been thought of in his philosophy of food. His joyful reaction to the fresh, cool taste was to declare it “food of utterly honey” before he looked intently at Nuin-Tara so as not to miss what expression the new substance would bring to her face when she tasted it. When she had swallowed her first peach and looked at him as if she could not believe what she had tasted, a glitter of delighted laughter fell from him and they started hugging each other repeatedly until they stopped to turn to François and Nonnie for more.
François emptied the tins in the proportion of two halves to Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo each for his, Nonnie’s and Hintza’s one. As a climax to the feast he gave the couple a tin each to drink the remainder of the rich juice. That perhaps, as far as they were concerned, was the ultimate delight of the evening, for when the last drop of juice had been eagerly and loudly sucked out of the tins, they improvised a little chant in low, murmuring voices for the magic of the food which they had just eaten. The chant had an odd prayer of thanks quality about it. Even Nonnie, though she could not understand a word, and so had no definite guide for its meaning, somehow knew why they were doing it.
She turned to François, remarking in a voice much more her own; “I don’t think I’ve ever known a nicer way of ending a meal.”
“And I,” François turned to her, putting his hand on hers, said, “have never been to a braver meal. Thank you, Nonnie, for eating your food. I do know you felt even less like eating than I did.”
She turned her head away, because more emotion, even so good and positive as those words of praise from François, was too much for one so charged with feelings as she was. She heard François ask, “Would you like me to translate what they’re chanting? I think you’d like it.”
She nodded, in case the effort to speak broke her self-control.
“I can only do it badly,” François replied. “As always when anything is connected with their god, Mantis, they’re using very old words. Sometimes they themselves don’t even know the meaning of them. They are just starting it again for the third time. It’s strange how on these occasions they always do things at least three times. It goes something like this:
‘And so on our feet upright walking,
After many days, we came at last
To the place of our father Mantis,
The snatcher of fire.
And on our heels sitting
Among those rocks of many colours,
Marked by men of the early race
In order to marking show
The place was utterly his.
We drank water of honey,
And ate the food so that the hunger
With which walking we came dying,
Died instead, on account of it.
Yes, here! Oh yes! Here,
In the place of our father,
Hunger died, on account of it.’”
Nonnie, lifted out of herself by this rendering of the chant, had the same look as she had had when she had been told that the cross on the walls of the cave was the work of Bushman. She said, “You know, when they first started chanting, it sounded a bit like a sort of prayer of thanks to me; but it’s almost like a psalm, don’t you think?”
François could not have been more pleased at her response. It seemed to be a sign that despite the enormous gap between Nonnie’s own culture and that of the Bushmen, she could bridge it to become as devoted to them as he was. But he left it at that and all he said was, “I’m so glad you feel as I do about it.”
They listened in silence until the chanting was over. Then François thought that with all they had to do, the sooner they went to sleep the better, and he asked Nonnie: “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind please taking the two empty tins, filling them with water and putting them on to boil, because I want to make some hot chocolate and milk for us as soon as possible, so that we can all try and sleep. We’ll need all the sleep we can get tonight and the sooner we have a go at it, the better. While you are doing that, forgive me if I don’t speak to you, because there are some things I have to talk over with Xhabbo.”
Despite the effect of François’s tranquilliser, sleep for Nonnie was the one thing of which she thought herself incapable. She would of course do her best, but knowing how often she had been kept awake by the anticipation even of pleasant things: how for instance she had not slept at all out of excitement the night before she and her father had flown out to Africa last, she thought sleep after such a day would be utterly out of the question. Nonetheless as a sign of her willingness to do all she could to help, she went immediately without a word to fill the large tins to the brim with water and placed them on their candle fires. She then tried to relax by lying sideways on the sand, leaning on her right elbow, close to Hintza where she could not only feel the ample warmth of his urgent body but could stroke his head and back, as much for her own comfort as for his. In that position she could keep her eye on the tins as well as watch the changes of expression on the faces of Xhabbo, Nuin-Tara and François as they came and went quickly in the ebb and flow of the long tidal swell of their talk, and which were her only guides to what they were saying.
Xhabbo’s account of his communion with his tapping can be summed up in a few sentences though it was long and elaborate in the telling. It amounted to this: the tapping had told him that their enemies down there in François’s place had not done with their search for François yet. They were determined to find him. Moreover they were not only in and around François’s home. It would be a fatal mistake to think that. They were in thousands everywhere, spread over the country, many, many days’ marching to the north and to the west, and coming in many thousands more from far away to spread out south and west into the world of the Europeans beyond.
That the tapping was true, Xhabbo could tell from his own experience on their long march to warn François, because the days were almost without number in which the two of them had not been hiding from dawn to sunset, and walking only by night in order to remain unseen by the hundreds of black men marching on Hunter’s Drift. Hence the tapping had warned Xhabbo that they must stay in the cave for many days, not coming out of it until the tapping told them it was time to stir again.
This was sombre news to François, not only because the tapping seemed to pronounce against what he was resolved to do that very night, but seemed to rule out the possibility of turning for help, such as trying to reach Mopani
and his body of well-armed rangers, or stopping a train at Hunter’s Drift Siding or, if that were not possible, making their way on foot through the bush to the great mining city which Hunter’s Drift had supplied with fresh meat and vegetables for so long. There was also the matter of warning the coloured people at Silverton Hill, but all these things now seemed forbidden by Xhabbo’s tapping. He knew how difficult, if not impossible and even immoral, it might be to get Xhabbo to go against his tapping.
So many indeed were his misgivings over what Xhabbo had just told him, that he had to struggle to keep them out of his voice, as he tried to answer Xhabbo in the only way he felt he could understand. He began by asking Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo to avoid any inflection of tone or expression which would tell Nonnie, who was watching them closely, that they were at all perturbed, by what he was going to say to them.
Of course he believed in Xhabbo’s tapping, he told them, but he had a tapping of his own which he could not disregard. This tapping was for him alone and it told him to go from the cave to do something of the greatest importance to him. Asking them not even to glance in her direction, he explained that as soon as Nonnie was asleep, he would have to go down to Hunter’s Drift to find out if his mother, Nonnie’s father or any other people, were still alive.
Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara did not immediately protest. They just sat there in silence, looking hard and long at him with the utmost commiseration before they both shook their heads and in voices low under the weight of natural compassion, exclaimed, “But surely you must know, Foot of the Day, that all your people have been killed?”
François admitted that he feared they were right, but he could not accept it until he had proved it to be a fact. He put the question to them with that primitive gravity he had so often seen in ’Bamuthi when his people doubted him. Would they, he asked them, if they were in his position and their people had been attacked that day, have gone away without making certain that there were no survivors held prisoner by such terrible enemies?
François wisely then left unanswered a question so full of meaning for them that it became almost tangible, like a dark presence there in the candle shadows peering over their shoulders, determined not to be denied. It did so because the question had been asked so many times among themselves in the course of their long history of persecution and was all the graver because it was combined with the tragic fore-knowledge induced in them by the experience of their race, that for all the necessity of asking the question, the exercise of proving his answer was invariably in vain.
Finally Xhabbo said, with fatalistic determination, “If you go, Foot of the Day, Xhabbo goes too.”
“No Xhabbo, no,” François replied immediately, struggling to keep down the emotion which Xhabbo’s loyal acceptance aroused in him. He knew how difficult it must be for Xhabbo to disobey when all his instincts were telling him it was wrong and disobedient to offer to come with him. “No, Xhabbo. I can’t let you do something which is against your own tapping. Besides, I think it is work that one can do more safely than two. And that one must be me. Only I know the ground down there below and the way of getting among those people without being seen. But I can’t tell you how my heart utterly thanks you for wanting to go with me.”
He stretched out his hand, put in on Xhabbo’s and pressed it. He would have said more had not Nonnie, who fortunately had not thought any more of the conversation than that they were reviewing the events of the day, called out just then in a voice as light and gay as she could make it, “Kettles all a-boiling sir!”
“I’ll be with you in a second,” François called back over his shoulder and hastened to ask Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara’s help, taking their agreement for granted, “I don’t want her to know what I’m going to do tonight. You must please help me. As soon as we have drunk the liquid I’m going to prepare for us, we must put out the fires and go to sleep as if we are going to do nothing but sleep all night. I will not go until I am certain she is fast asleep.”
Nuin-Tara gave him a look, as if to say it was just like a man to assume that a woman could just lie down and calmly go to sleep after what Nonnie had been through. But she did François an injustice because he had already realised this difficulty and thought of a way of solving it. However she merely looked meaningfully at him and did not speak.
François then joined Nonnie and together they poured large amounts of the best Hunter’s Drift chocolate into the two mugs and added boiling water, stirring each with his knife. He added a fistful of sugar to each. With the boiling water left he repeated the process in the two old peach tins, finally adding to mugs and tins the contents of a tin of sweet condensed milk. He gave the mugs to Nonnie and Nuin-Tara, and the tins to Xhabbo and himself, but before drinking the fragrant, steaming brew, he took two sleeping draughts from his store and held them out to Nonnie, saying, “Please take these with your chocolate.”
It was perhaps a sign of the new Nonnie that was being painfully born that although everything in her clamoured to reject the capsules, she paused only briefly before taking them from him and swallowing them.
Patting her chest lightly with the flat of her hand, as if to help down the capsules, she made a face at François before exclaiming, not with a certain air of triumph, “There, I think I did rather well, don’t you?”
François did not get a chance to say how grateful he was because the sight of the capsules produced the greatest surge of excitement in Xhabbo yet. He was nudging Nuin-Tara, exhorting her, unusually imperative, to look quickly, because there were the most magic things of all about which he had told her; the things which, all the time he was lying in the cave so full of pain that even his tapping could not get through to him, would send him to sleep. More, they would give him unfailingly what he called “the sleep of honey with dreams of honey.”
Nonnie compelled François to translate all this though he would obviously rather not have done so. In the process, he confirmed her fears that she was being further drugged, though they were somewhat calmed by François’s declaration, “I myself won’t hesitate to take some of these if I find I can’t sleep. My father took them for years without them doing him any harm.”
François is’s version of hot chocolate seemed to raise the spirits of Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara to a new height of delight, and their many gestures and expressions of astonishment were so novel and vivid that Nonnie, watching them, forgot the capsules. They would without a doubt have celebrated the end of the chocolate with another chant but François prevented them by getting up and giving them a meaning look. He said it was time they all went to bed.
Going to bed for Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo was a simple process. Nuin-Tara just stretched herself out on the sand, lying on her left side with her head on her arm, her legs slightly drawn up. Xhabbo lay close up against her, with his head on one hand and his right arm round her. So at home and belonging to the ground did they appear, that the earth which itself was asleep under the great blanket of an African night and dreaming of infinite summers of increase communicated its own heavy need for slumber to them, so that they were hardly in position before they were both instantly asleep. One aspect of their capacity for instant sleep which must not be overlooked for all its prosaic nature, was the far, hard walk behind them.
Nonnie’s bed, which François prepared on the sand near the picture of St. Hubert, was only a slightly more elaborate affair. He emptied the largest haversack, half-filled it with fresh, clean sand, fastened the buckles of the flap and placed it firmly on the softest, level sand.
Calling Hintza to him he said firmly, “Now, Hin, you lie there and sleep, and do not move until I call you.” He pointed to a place at right angles to the haversack but slightly to the side.
Turning to Nonnie, he said: “There, Nonnie, is your pillow and Hin is your hot-water-bottle. I’m sorry I haven’t got an eiderdown for you as well, but please try it. It might not be so hard and cold as it looks, with Hin to warm you.”
“But what about you?” Nonnie asked. “Where are you
going to sleep?”
François’s answer was oblique if not evasive: “I’m afraid I can’t go to sleep just yet. I have something to write before I can go to sleep.” Seeing her astonishment, he explained, without really explaining, “It’s some writing we may need in the morning. When I have done that, any old place will do for me. I have slept out on the ground so much, you know!”
“But can’t the writing wait until morning?” Nonnie protested, strangely dismayed by François’s reply for many reasons she herself did not understand at the time, but fastening on this one aspect to express all her disappointment.
“No, I’m afraid it can’t,” François answered with that unexpected firmness she was now beginning to realise had to be accepted. “We’ll have a lot of other things to do in the morning. It has got to be now.”
Nonnie wanted to ask more about this mysterious writing, not just out of curiosity but also to protract the moment. The last thing she wanted was to be left alone during what she was convinced would be a sleepless night. Yet, despite all the wretchedness of the day behind taking her by the throat again, her proud, young spirit felt she had no dignified option but to turn her back on François, go over to Hintza, lie down and curl up beside him. Doing so, she put her arm round him as Xhabbo had his round Nuin-Tara. She was rewarded by a whimper of welcome from Hintza who, in his expert manner, would not sacrifice the least bit of anything so useful to an exhausted dog as sleep in order to be aware of what was happening in the world around him. She lay there, eyes wide open, smarting with hurt, staring to where St. Hubert was lost in candle shadow.
Meanwhile François took his candle and stood it in the sand against a far wall of the cave where its light would least trouble the sleepers. He took out the despatch note-book which he always carried. From the moment he had learned to write, Mopani had insisted that no hunter of any worth went into the bush without paper and pencil in case of emergency. Mopani had told him many stories of Europeans in Africa who had got into trouble because they had ignored this simple and obvious precaution and so could not summon any help, because they spoke neither the language of the people among whom they found themselves, nor possessed material for a written message. Mopani had delivered his lesson so graphically and so often that François had never yet gone out into the bush without a note-book and pencil in a side pocket of his bush shirt.
A Far Off Place Page 5