That was little enough, considering the slow rate at which he would have to crawl through the garden. Yet he was concerned not so much with getting out of the garden as to be far enough away from his home not to be injured, or even killed, by the explosion, which would be colossal. Once the charge went off, he felt that the panic among the men would be so great and the need for rescuing what remained of life in the shattered house so urgent that they would give no further thought for a time to him, or anything else abroad in the night.
He just had to be certain before he lit the fuse that there was nobody about in the garden to delay his escape through the half-door itself. So, placing the end of the fuse carefully on the hilt of his knife, he went to the half-door, undid the bolt again and opened the door slowly, and looked out.
Thank Heaven he had done so! There were men on the main path, already so close to the house that he quickly pulled the door towards him until only the smallest of cracks was left to peer through. Had they seen anything? Were they coming back to report some new suspicion that would send another patrol out into the night? Had he come so far and so close to accomplishing what he had set out to do and indeed so much more, and now was not going to be allowed to see it through?
It was, perhaps, the most agonising of many agonising moments of the long hours behind him. Although the noise of boots told him the men were walking briskly to the main door in the garden wall, they went by far too slowly for his racing heart. Luckily, when the terrible retarded moment came and the door of the garden was at last open and the men stood briefly black in the glow from the house beyond, before they vanished and the door was shut again, he was instantly calm again with hope. Yet he waited in case their mission was not mere routine and for the hundredth time thanked Heaven for Mopani and ’Bamuthi’s teaching that patience was not only nature’s greatest prescription of wisdom but often also the quickest possible solution of the most urgent problems.
Some five minutes later the gate opened again, and the same number of men passed through the rectangle of amber but not the same men. François could tell that from the kind of shadow they made against the glow, brief as it was. The men marched off briskly down the main path so that he felt he had every right to assume he had merely been witnessing a change of guard, and that he could not have been presented with a better moment for his exit.
Accordingly, he ducked down into the cellar, groped his way back to his knife, found the end of the fuse and quickly lit it. It started off spluttering in such a manner that to François’s exaggerated sense of hearing it made a crackling that he feared must be audible outside and perhaps even in the rooms above. Near panic, he drove his knife back into his sheath and was down on his hands and knees crawling as fast as he could to the half-door. Reaching it, he opened it deftly and luckily in the act of opening, became calm enough again, because close as he was to the burning fuse, flashing in the dark like a swarm of tiny fire flies as it spluttered on its way among wine-racks, barrels, kegs, vats, packing cases and supplies of all kinds to the wagon chest invisible in the darkness beyond, he no longer heard it. Above all its train of sparks cast no reflection on the darkness and could only be visible to eyes looking directly down into the cellar floor itself.
With that consoling thought he was through the half-door, composed enough to force the bolt back into its catch and then crawling into the ditch and, for all his exhortation to the contrary, going faster than he had come to the centre of the garden. If he could only get there before the dynamite went up, he felt he had a fair chance of survival.
Had there been some Olympic record for crawling on one’s stomach, François’s progress along the ditch to the comparative safety of the centre of the garden would surely have broken it. Yet he himself continued to feel as if he were some sort of insect struggling through a sea of treacle. So great was this feeling of slowness as well as his sense of the vital necessity of getting as far from the house as possible before the explosion came, that he would not allow himself a pause for breath as he had done on the way in. Exhausted as he became, something from he knew not where provided him with energy to keep on crawling. The sound of his heart and his blood in his ears became so loud that he was convinced he must be deaf to all other sound. All else was utterly still and he was amazed suddenly to find himself at the crossways of the various furrows and ditches on the edge of the great tomato beds at the centre of the garden with the explosion from the house still to come.
There he had reached a distance from the house at which he might be relatively safe from the effects of the explosion, yet even then he did not pause for breath. Instead of following the ditch which had brought him from the reservoir, he chose a furrow leading directly to the end of the garden and orchard on the edge of the clearing between the homelands and the bush, because that was the shortest way to the cave. It meant crossing the clearing without the comforting shelter of the walls of the main irrigation ditch and increasing the risks of being seen. But he took to these readily because he was convinced that one certain consequence of the explosion would be to draw every guard and sentry towards his shattered headquarters, and that the shortest and quickest way out therefore would also be the safest. Once the panic caused by the explosion had passed and the rescue work done, his enemies would be free to give their minds to the causes of the explosion. That could only lead to one conclusion: a conclusion pointed at him, for what other explanation could there possibly be? Then, it was certain, the most intensive of searches would immediately be mounted.
He had gone some twenty yards along his new course, sweating from exhaustion and wondering how much longer he could go on, as well as worrying increasingly that something may have gone wrong with his fuse, for why had the explosion not yet come, when he was horrified to hear a muffled sort of shouting from the direction of the house. It sounded very much as if someone were in the cellar and giving an hysterical alarm.
The shout was immediately answered by others, louder, though still somewhat muffled, suggesting that though they were still coming from within the house, they were from persons on a higher level, he assumed the level of dining-room and kitchen. Hardly had these shouts died away when, in that silence of steel of what must now be the closing hours of the night, he heard first a peremptory blast on a military whistle and a great cry in a voice which he recognised from the way it rolled its “r’s”, even at that pitch and volume, to be that of a Scot. “Guard! Stand to! Guard!”
François’s heart, as ’Bamuthi would have said, turned black on him then. He could not doubt that someone had gone into the cellar, probably for more wine, and discovered his fuse, wrenched it out of its charge and rushed to warn the officers he had seen in conference in the dining-room above. The great search he had half-feared was being organised at that very moment, he was certain, and within minutes would be set in motion all round house and garden. His despair and frustration were so great then that, added to physical exhaustion, the power to crawl seemed to have left him. But the terrible conviction of failure had hardly overwhelmed him when, even there where he lay with his eyes on a black, dank irrigation furrow, he was blinded by a violent flash of light. It was followed by a blast so powerful that the walls of the furrow above him were stripped of all their covering bushes and a wave of shock tore at his tough whipcord jacket so that his belt was jerked upwards into his armpits. The jacket itself was thrown like a sack over his head, the strap of his hat was torn from its clasp and carried away into the darkness ahead.
Stunned, he felt he would never be able to see or hear again but he could indeed hear, for some long seconds later, fragments of what had once been his home spattered down like hail all round him. One half brick landed on the earth wall of the furrow beside him, shooting dirt like buckshot stinging against his cheek and head. There followed a moment of strange, awesome silence, until from the great smooth cliff face where the irrigation furrow left the river, came the echo of the explosion. Though it was only an echo from far away, the volume and slow i
ntensity of its rumble was like an amen of annihilation. It was quickly followed by all kinds of cries and shouts of dismay and outrage and bewildered commands. What was of more immediate importance to François, there appeared from the direction of the reservoir on his left, as well as the far end of the garden ahead and the wall to his right, diminished as his senses were by the blast, the shapes of men making no effort at disguise. They were running as fast as ditches and vegetable beds would allow them, straight towards his shattered home.
François propped himself on his elbows, certain now that no one would have eyes and ears for him. He watched the shapes draw level and pass by him on all sides before turning his head, determined to make certain that they had all indeed gone back to their base. He was in time to see the first flames of fire flower proudly in the dark above the house.
Obviously there was soon going to be such a blaze that the garden would be lit as if by day. The thought sent him to his feet and doubling down a furrow he knew by heart. He paused only to pick up his hat some fifty feet from where he had lain and then hurried on, passing through the rows of fig trees, climbing over the last wall and for the first time felt he could pause purely to rest.
Even so he did not rest long. He suspected that the moment daylight came a new search for him would be started. This time, the men would not look for him in the text-book military manner as the day before, but set the best trackers among their soldiers—and most Africans from the interior were inspired trackers—to cast about for spoor of him, and then by methodically following the signs he could not avoid leaving behind, track him down. So, instead of preparing to go straight back to the cave which was so temptingly near, on a direct line from where he was, François set off in the opposite direction, to carry him on a parallel course, past the house towards the bush, and right away from the cave. He would have liked more rest but from the way the fire was soaring up and lighting up the landscape, he knew he could not afford to wait.
Once more running, he took to a cattle trail which led away from the old kraals in his chosen direction. When clear of the garden wall, where the fire was beginning to propel waves of light to break over the darkness above the clearing, he slowed down to make himself as inconspicuous as possible by bending double and carrying his rifle in his hand at the trail. The precaution seemed all the more urgent, because all the shouting and screaming had died away. All he heard was the crackling of flames and this somehow told him that the men there were already organised into rescue parties and order being brought to the situation.
The temptation to stop, and look back to see if there might not already be men between him and the flames was great, but he resisted it. He needed all he had of vision for the track in order to travel as fast as possible. Besides, even more than the enemy just then, he feared he would not have the strength, fit as he was, to go on again fast enough to save himself if he paused to look back. However, his desperation enabled him to cross the clearing and reach the cover of the bush.
Only then did he allow himself to feel exhaustion, as even he had never known it. It was almost too much for him to turn over on to his stomach, crawl into the shelter of a bush right on the fringe of the clearing and, gasping for breath, compel himself to look back and make certain that he had not been followed.
The fire now stood high, wide and awesome. The clearing was lit as a stage. One quick glance was enough to show it empty.
At once his head fell back on his arms, and he lay prone until his breathing was more or less normal again. Yet even then he felt paralysed with a fatigue of monstrous proportions because it was a fatigue of body joined to an immense weariness of heart and mind. He was, without knowing it, a victim of an instinctive provision in the life of man which, in moments of danger, suppresses all thoughts and emotions that might confuse the appropriate reaction to the situation and so make the human response inadequate for survival. But once the danger is overcome, all that has been irrelevant to the immediate need—the fear, the anguish, the physical pain, the fatigue and all the other subtle variations of these things that are held back to form a volcanic charge of negation, erupt as another challenge.
This was so overwhelming in François’s case that it seemed to him that he lay there for hours, eyes shut, head pressed on his arm and body clinging to the earth like a frightened child against its mother. He felt as if he would never be able to separate himself from his native earth because just then it seemed the only solid and unchanging substance left in a shattered world. He was terrified that he would not have the strength of mind or body to deny himself the sense of comfort and support which he derived in the process, and he might have gone on lying there, irresolute behind the cover of the bush far too long for his safety, had it not been for the fire.
The fire had grown so great that the lids of his eyes suddenly seemed translucent and the darkness into which his fatigue had plunged him diminished. He opened his eyes wide, raised his head and looked on the greatest peak of flame he had ever seen. He knew, of course, that he had started the fire. Yet it looked now as if some other force had joined in it to make it more than a fire of thatch and wood. All feeling of his predicament and fatigue were eliminated by the wonder of the magnitude and terrible beauty of it. He found himself observing it as if it were a supernatural beacon on the marches of some strange no-man’s area of life. Indeed, somewhere far back, a memory prompted him, as if he were an actor who had forgotten his lines, that there was some Biblical illustration connected with it. And at once all was plain. At that precise moment, the long, pointed blade of flame prodding the stars became a sword, the whole surround of fire sustaining it, a carving by light out of darkness, another Gothic version in flame of the archangel mounted over the gate of the garden at the beginning of the day man was expelled from it for ever.
Watching the archangelic shape of fire reach still higher and the vast garden and orchards of his own beginning with its surround of his beloved fig trees allegorical with flame, the feeling that invaded François of being sentenced to irrevocable exile was too much. He knew instantly then, not as thought but as an acute physical pain, that never again could there be a return to a world of innocence where animal, bird, flower, fruit and men had been so at one as at Hunter’s Drift. And, at that moment, the discharge of emotion, stress and fatigue that would have interfered with his efficiency earlier on left him without shield against this first sword-thrust of banishment.
All at once he was crying as he had never cried before. It was just as well that he was alone and unobserved then, and that this equinoctial storm of heart and mind in a bitter seasonal transition could sweep through him with no outside restraint, and that he had just enough time there in the dark to let it run its natural course.
As a result, his unconditional surrender to natural emotion, which the civilised human being would have rejected as weakness, became a source of new strength. Indeed, it had so cathartic an effect that, when it ended, his fatigue, great as it was, had been blown over the horizon of his mind and he was free to think of the urgent future. How free was clear from the fact that he suddenly seized his rifle and jumped to his feet. He took a last look across the still empty clearing and the sword of flame plunged up to its hilt into the sky. Instinctively he made a sign of the cross against the night, not in Nonnie’s but in Xhabbo’s way, with the whole of his hand, palm wide open and fingers together as if the “asking” and “tapping” in him had met in order to exorcise the last spell of negation of an enchanted past upon this new, locked-out self. And he could almost hear ’Bamuthi’s voice in his ear repeating one of his favourite sayings as it had so often done in tones of gravity, heavy enough to match the seriousness he himself attached to its truth. “The child can look back straight to the river, the man always has eyes only for the crooked footpath and the hills in front.”
Then he promptly turned his back on his home and went along the narrow track deeper into the bush. He made no effort to go silently, or to conceal his spoor, until he came, in a
round-about way, to the place where he had once hidden Xhabbo after rescuing him from the lion trap. There, he stepped carefully on to the first outcropping of stone on to the flank of the hill leading up to the cave. Knowing the ground so well, he managed to step from one stone to the other not once putting his feet to the earth, bushes or grass in between. He had no objection to the trackers, which the enemy would have on his spoor in the morning, discovering any tracks of his in the bush below. But for obvious reasons it was more imperative than ever that he should leave no fresh mark or indication of the faintest kind of draw the enemy’s attention to the hill. Once incited into examining the hill, he was convinced that his enemies would have trackers inspired enough to discover enough signs to lead them to the cave.
Somehow he had to draw them away from the hill, and convince them that, after the destruction of his home, he had left the area for good. He had heard enough to know that his enemies were exceedingly well-informed about the detail of life at Hunter’s Drift. After all, they had as a source of intelligence ’Bamuthi’s kinsman from Osebeni, who had joined forces with them. For instance they knew all about Hintza and the fact that the two of them were inseparable. They could not, therefore, fail to know about his relationship with Mopani, who, after all, had bred Hintza. Indeed, Mopani and his well-equipped headquarters in the vast game reserve, with its ample communications by telephone with the outside world, itself was an urgent military objective if the enemy were to secure the period of unobserved rest and regrouping which he had heard them discuss only a few hours before. They must already have planned to cut the communications between Mopani’s camp and the outside world as soon as possible, and with such intelligence and respect for detail of which he already had such terrifying evidence, François was certain that they must have reckoned with the probability that Mopani’s main camp would have been the obvious place for François to turn for help.
A Far Off Place Page 10