“Foot of the Day, good, good!” he whispered the words she knew, pressing her hand to his chest to show her how good he felt both François and their situation to be.
She longed to believe him but doubted him longer than necessary, because to have been uplifted into conviction again only to have it denied utterly by facts later on, would have been the end of the road as far as she was concerned. But then, when Nuin-Tara also put her hand on her shoulder to smile a smile of thanksgiving at her, she no longer doubted and before she could give more thought or perhaps more feeling to the matter, the signal came from Xhabbo to be on their feet at once and run as they had never run before.
The relief not only of action but of actually participating physically in something she now believed François and Hintza to be doing as well, somewhere on a line parallel to their own, was as stimulating to her spirit as that brandy warming her within. She felt she could now follow Xhabbo all day to that infinity of time where all parallels could meet.
Xhabbo led off with no effort at concealment, since the shooting clearly showed how the enemy had lost their heads and had poured over the hill, confused and in the wrong direction as he and François had intended. As a result, just as the first light broke, they found without hindrance the old hippopotamus trail in the rushes and papyrus along the river banks which Xhabbo had described to François. From there, hidden from human eyes, they travelled at relative ease and not long after noon, they were installed underneath the ledge of the hill without any sign of pursuit behind them.
After that there had only been one other moment of real alarm and that was when they heard the far-off sound of rifle-fire during the attack on Hannibal the Great and the brutal dispersal of his order. But again, Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara, after listening to the sounds carefully, had made light of it in pantomime so convincingly that Nonnie’s heart was reassured—a heart that was with François and Hintza all the more because she had no experience of any kind to support her spirit by enabling it to be with them in imagination as well.
One should not exaggerate, however, and suggest that all her anxiety on their behalf was ended. It remained great all afternoon but it was not comparable to anything she had felt at any time in the cave during François’s previous absence because somehow up there on that great hill, with the Atlantic view of the land of Africa uninhibited and urgent, unfolding itself in wave upon wave of light and shadow, flashing river and precious stream, yellow hill and purple valley, levelling out like the spent swell of some sea of summer on a vast foreshore of sand, where the blue of the sky prolonged the blue of the earth a hundred or more miles away, she just could not help a feeling of having broken out of prison with a prospect of freedom at last before her. She could not know then that she was having her first glimpse of the desert that was Xhabbo’s and Nuin-Tara’s home. She knew only that seeing such abundant and turbulent earth resolved in so calm and firm an horizon did her senses good.
All this was helped along by an instinct which compels life after each encounter with disaster to turn about and reach out towards a vision of what, for all its inevitable remoteness, promises renewal and increase of life. And so begins, however reluctantly, some new movement towards the future. In the primitive worlds of the past whole peoples abandoned the capital of a dead king and hastened on to found a new one for his successor elsewhere. So a similar urge had begun to stir in Nonnie during the flight from the cave to Lamb-snatcher’s Hill. Her being had, however intangibly, undergone a change of course and come under the pull of a mysterious force of gravity in the human spirit which determines that a journey into the unknown in the world without produces a movement towards new and unknown areas in our world within. There is a profound interdependence of world without and world within, and experience in either one of them is valid also in the other. Whenever one succeeds in breaking the code wherein their meaning is transmitted from one dimension to the other, this validity is so marked that one wonders whether they are really two different dimensions and not just two aspects of one and the same whole. The visible world being merely the spirit seen from without; the spirit, just the world without seen from within.
If this had not been so, one doubts whether this sense of a new dimension could have helped as much as it was by Nuin-Tara, once they reached sanctuary on Lamb-snatcher’s Hill. From the moment of arrival she began to do her utmost to teach Nonnie a new language as well as a new role in life. She made her repeat new Bushman words after her, over and over again, until she had mastered not only the meaning but the sounds, and clicks. She also trained her in the elementary duties of Bushman housekeeping on the march.
There was first of all, Nuin-Tara showed her by example and pantomime, the importance of preparing the place which was to be home for the night. She showed her first of all how the beds had immediately to be made before it could be too dark to see; the ground cleared of litter, stones, pebbles, twigs, smoothed out and patted down with their hands until it was level and clean. In all this Nuin-Tara was so exacting that it took considerable time. When it was done at last, and Nonnie stood up straight behind Nuin-Tara to inspect the ground at their feet, she had a distinct illusion of having helped to create two bedrooms equipped with two double-beds. Nuin-Tara, by some telepathy of the universal feminine, must have known what she was imagining, for she smacked her lips with satisfaction and pointed at the ground to confirm Nonnie’s unuttered conclusion by saying, “Xhabbo, Nuin-Tara,” and then moved the finger a bit further to the right, to add, “Foot of the Day, Nonnie.”
She then beckoned to Nonnie to follow her and turned about to make for the centre of the ground under the vast overhang of rock. Nonnie’s illusion that she had been helping in the building of a home was by then so confirmed that she felt as ifin the act of complying she were walking through a bedroom door.
She knelt happily beside Nuin-Tara, imitated her movements and to her amazement found that the earth was surprisingly soft and supple and that mixed in with it were the ashes of what must obviously have been the remains of the fires of countless generations of Bushman travellers. This sense of others having been there before them, induced a strange feeling of having company in their homely duties. As a result, this part of their work took no time at all. Soon she was following Nuin-Tara outside into the thick bushes, scrub and thorn trees which covered the approaches to their shelter and helping her to gather wood for the fire-place they had just constructed.
There was no scarcity of dead wood on what Nonnie almost thought of now as their door-step, but even so apparently easy a task was made difficult by Nuin-Tara, since she was as exacting and discriminating in doing it as she had been in the making of their beds. The nearest and most obvious of dead wood was not good enough for her. She made it plain to Nonnie that only the driest and thinnest wood would do for a reason which became plain to Nonnie only much later. They made a score of journeys between the brush and the fire-place before they had wood enough to Nuin-Tara’s special specifications. Again Nonnie was amazed at Nuin-Tara’s minute sense of the fitness of domestic things. She herself would have been quite happy to let the wood lie there in the two untidy heaps into which it had been piled, since it was to be burned up in fire soon enough anyway. But Nuin-Tara compelled her to join in sorting out the wood, breaking it into suitable and more or less equal lengths, and then stacking it row upon row in a large, rectangular pile to the left of their fireplace. Then from a dark corner at the far end of the ledge, Nuin-Tara fetched some flat stones, blackened presumably by the fires whose ashes Nonnie had helped to scoop out of the ground. In a most expert fashion, she built a range of stone around the scooped-out earth and with the air of a Vestal Virgin performing a sacred ritual, reverently laid some carefully selected wood ready for a fire underneath it.
After that it was the turn of the haversacks. For the first time Nuin-Tara made herself take second place with great good grace, signalling to Nonnie that she would be relieved if she would take over this part of the housekeeping. She helped
Nonnie only to carry the three haversacks they had brought with them to a platform of stone where the ceiling of the rock curved sharply down towards the earth before coming to rest on a broad ledge some four feet high. She stood back silently while Nonnie unpacked, and watched each article extracted almost as if it were not inanimate matter at all but highly animate and a part of some exciting new drama. Slight as this delegation of responsibility was, it was extraordinary to Nonnie how significant and arduous she suddenly felt it to be. It was as if she had been put on her own special mettle and was afraid that in some way she might fail to do the unpacking and arrangement of their supplies to Nuin-Tara’s satisfaction. She already knew from François how few possessions Bushmen owned and would have felt it right to be asked to unpack and sort out what must havo appeared an embarrassment of riches to Nuin-Tara, had she not already been overawed by the immensely fastidious example that Nuin-Tara had set in all other things. In her apprehension she fumbled and occasionally dropped some cartons of medicines, happily without damage, on the sandy floor. But in the end she had all their food and medicines arranged in their logical order on the ledge.
Right in front, their folded handles bracketed to the side of the ledge and upside down, she laid the dixies which had been fitted, military fashion, into the pockets provided for them on their rucksacks. They gleamed like aluminium saucepans on a kitchen dresser and gave so fine and authentic a domestic quality to her work that Nonnie should have been reassured. Bandages and medicines at the back, then a row of heaps of preserved fig, peach, apricot, apple and plum, bright as in an impressionist still-life, followed by several rows of biltong, another of thick slabs of sweet milk chocolate and finally, glowing brown and gold, mounds of Ousie-Johanna’s finest rusks. The ledge was transformed into a model little larder.
Yet she was oddly afraid of what Nuin-Tara’s reaction would be as she stepped back to look over what she had done. Also she was remembering a favourite maxim of her old nurse Amelia. Always after she had been made to help in tidying their bedrooms and quarters in the series of government houses in which she had grown up, the vast, statuesque Amelia would admonish her monumentally, “Now remember, Luciana, before leaving a room, you must always stand back in the doorway to survey what you have done, like an officer in your father’s guard inspecting a detail of sentries about to relieve the watch. You will be surprised how often people, yes, although I confess it to my shame, even Amelia has left some important detail undone.”
She stood back trembling inwardly, near to tears at this unbidden thought of her butchered nurse. It was almost as if Amelia were standing behind her. If Amelia had, of course she could not have failed to notice that Nonnie had never been so obedient and conscientious to her commands as now when she was not there to supervise their execution. Nonnie’s doubts about her capacities on this occasion were needless, for she had hardly begun her military inspection when Nuin-Tara smacked her lips with delight, clapped her hands and at the same time did the little curtsey Bushmen women do when they are about to begin a dance of thanks. Indeed she tripped a little fantastic step or two of delight in front of the ledge before seizing Nonnie’s hand to exclaim, “Good, good, very good!”
And immediately Nonnie was glowing all over and confident enough to be strangely thrilled by her work. She clasped her hands tightly in front of her and turned round and round to take in all they had done together, feeling for the first time what it must be like to make a home of her own.
Eyes shining, she faced Nuin-Tara to exclaim, “Merveilloso! Isn’t it lovely? We’ve got a complete house now, thanks to you. Two double bedrooms, a kitchen-dining-room and now a larder complete with a dresser.”
Nuin-Tara obviously had no idea of the exact meaning of the words but could not fail to take the spirit and the sense for granted. Suddenly, as if she herself had an Amelia within, she placed her legs astride, her two hands on her hips, and now with a look of the utmost gravity resurveyed the scene. The attitude belonged not only to her and Amelia but to woman everywhere making certain that her duties for the day had been scrupulously discharged.
It would be impossible to exaggerate the good all this did to Nonnie. Nuin-Tara’s attitude was implicit with the kind of self-respect that is pecularly a feminine speciality; a unique form of courage to endure in their care for life and living things, no matter how grim and formidable the circumstances thrown against it. Cities and homes may be pillaged and destroyed. The Carmona of Nonnie’s mother had been destroyed, and her mother killed in an African St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre just as the home of François’s Hunter’s Drift had been destroyed and his mother in turn massacred beside her father, Amelia, and Ousie-Johanna. But what she happened to be seeing in Nuin-Tara just then was a demonstration of an essential built-in pattern of the feminine spirit which ensured that always out of ashes and rubble, new shapes, new and greater versions of what had gone before would rise. She thought she had never seen any woman look as beautiful to her as Nuin-Tara did just then. Wonderfully lifted out of her wounded self, she went up to Nuin-Tara, put her arms round her and her head between her naked breasts, held her close and let tears of sheer gratitude and admiration run without impediment out of the corners of her closed eyes. Instantly Nuin-Tara’s arms went round her, pressed her closer and then freed a hand to stroke the back of Nonnie’s head and its long, fine and black Iberian hair with great tenderness. They were still standing like that in that act of communion of oecumenical woman when Xhabbo appeared on the track at the entrance to their shelter.
All the while Nuin-Tara and Nonnie were at work preparing their shelter for the night, Xhabbo had been conspicuously absent. He had been far more disturbed by the sound of shooting than he cared to admit even to Nuin-Tara. He had been often enough under fire from the African impis who annually, after the rains fell, foraged deep into the desert in order to capture young Bushman boys and girls: boys to be turned into slave-herds for their cattle grazing on the fringes of the desert, the girls as concubines for their rulers and headmen, who were inordinately attracted by their light copper-coloured skins. He could tell the difference between the sound of rifle-fire which hit only thin air and the sound of shot that went truly home in its target. Far off as that sound of gunfire was, he had no doubt that many of the shots he was hearing smacked as if they had hit what they were meant to hit. Moreover they were coming precisely from the direction which he knew François and Hintza would have taken in the first instance.
All this would have perturbed him to the point of despair, had it not been for one strange element in the sound of the shooting. Had those shots been aimed only at François and Hintza, he was certain they would not have had to fire so many times to kill the two of them as those shots he heard were killing their targets. Of course, from what both he and François had seen of their enemies and their attack on Hunter’s Drift the day before, they were quite capable of going on shooting long after the targets were dead but even so, there seemed to him something unexplained, if not reassuring, about this aspect of the matter. It did not rule out the possibility of course that François and Hintza could have been killed by some of those shots at the beginning. But all in all, the sheer volume of the sound suggested that much more than just a young man had been killed. But what could that something else possibly have been?
In order to seek the answer to this disturbing puzzle, he immediately left the women alone to their duties and climbed to the top of Lamb-snatcher’s Hill, taking care not to show himself on the skyline of the great summit. From there he carefully surveyed the scene; first in the direction from which they themselves had come. He observed that there was not the slightest indication that they were being followed, as there would have been by now if that were so. He then surveyed the land in the direction of the shooting. There was nothing unusual to be seen for quite a while, until a mile or so away as the beloved bees flew in the bed of the valley, the blue smoke of several fires suddenly rose in lazy spirals up into the thin, still afternoon air. He
could tell that they were cooking fires from the pattern of the smoke and thought that they were fires cooking the food of many men, judging by their size and number. He assumed too that the shooting may have had something to do with providing the cooks by the fires with material for the cooking. But again that, of course, did not exclude the dreadful possibility that François and Hintza may have been disposed of first in so long and sustained an outburst of shooting. Indeed the supposition was supported in Xhabbo’s estimation by the fact that their enemies—the longer he walked the more certain he became of his first impression that so many fires could only have been lit by their enemies—were unlikely to have broken off their pursuit of François and Hintza to start cooking a meal so early in the afternoon, unless they had accomplished their mission. His spirit would have been altogether clouded over with despair if it had not been that his strangely acute sense of tapping persisted that François and Hintza, though in trouble, were not dead.
Consequently, he had stayed on watch on the summit of the hill, knowing that if François were still alive and his own reading of the smoke and its meaning were correct, François would be unable to make for the place of meeting on the hill as they had so hurriedly agreed on in the early hours of the morning, but would come towards it from some unpredictable direction. Part of him knew that he ought to be down below to help Nuin-Tara and Nonnie in their preparations for the night. Although they had supplies of food enough with them for the moment, he knew as François would have done, that these were supplies to be drawn upon only in emergencies. The sooner they started living off the land in the Bushman way the better.
His conscience in this regard was quickened by the greatest and subtlest of temptations to which a Bushman could be subjected. A strange, unobtrusive brown and white little bird had come just at that moment to settle on a bush nearby and started to deliver itself of a demonically urgent and maddeningly persistent cry of “Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick!”
A Far Off Place Page 24