All he could manage was, “Please, Nonnie and you too, Xhabbo, help me to get Hin away from this fire and put him down to sleep with his head on the other side of that haversack.”
Together, they lifted Hintza, carried him over and laid him down in the right position. François stepped back over the haversack and stretched himself out on the other side as if on a bed of feathers. It seemed to Nonnie that he was fast and uncannily asleep in an instant; indeed so deeply asleep that he did not hear another haversack being placed beside his own or feel Nonnie settling down, her arm going naturally round him.
Nonnie, of course, was tired as well, though obviously not as tired as François. The turmoil of what she had been through, particularly the shock of finding François gone, and the fear and anxiety experienced during the long period of inactivity in the cave was still too great to let her sleep at once. She would lift her head from time to time and through half-closed eyes first see Nuin-Tara coming alone to her bed near them, and then, on the far side of the fire, Xhabbo getting up and taking his spear to walk out into the comparative open beyond the shelter. He stood there for a long time, his head and shoulders clear-cut against a segment of sky spattered with starlight. Xhabbo was listening, as she was, to the sounds of the night, the bark of the great baboon sentries on the cliffs above and the coughing of leopards in the bush with a volume and density which, had she known it, impressed Xhabbo as much as it made her fear. Out of her fear she looked at the neat, economical fire Nuin-Tara had built and wondered whether so small a flame was enough and should not be multiplied a hundred times if fire were ever to make them safe in such surroundings. But she already had drawn the relevant lessons from her experience of Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara’s apparent infallibility in such things and begun to make it an axiom of her new self not to question them in matters outside her own knowledge.
Xhabbo, she thought at first, was standing there on guard but after a time the outline turned abruptly about, passed along the mouth of the overhang of rock and vanished in the direction from which François and Hintza had come, to let the starlight come down like rain unhindered on their wide doorstep.
It felt many hours before she woke, heard and saw Xhabbo again at the mouth of their shelter and Nuin-Tara on her knees putting fresh wood on their fire. François was still sound asleep. Hintza was no longer snoring but breathing heavily, his nose almost in her ear. The noise outside of leopards coughing and baboons barking had been joined by the ominous howling of the big striped hyenas and the far-off yacking of jackals, indicating that the great glittering wheel of the night dripping with the heavy water of time was turned over remorselessly towards day.
Anxious to be more than just a sleeping partner on the journey in front of them, she forced herself to get up, and sign to Nuin-Tara indicating that she would like to look after the fire from then on so that Nuin-Tara could have more sleep. A wide smile accompanied a gracious refusal, and she was told in no uncertain feminine terms that her place of duty for the night was beside François who, despite his sleep, was showing signs of being aware that he had been left alone. It looked as if his left hand was searching around him, his sleeping self mystified and uneasy. She hastened back to his side. She had barely put her arm round him again when he spoke in a slurred manner, Nonnie thought in his sleep, as she could just hear, “His nose, Nonnie, his nose!”
She ignored it because it seemed to make no sense to her and she thought any question from her would wake him needlessly. But after a while the words came again, unmistakably in a more agitated manner: “His nose, please! His nose!”
“Whose nose, Coiske, whose nose?” she asked softly.
She had to murmur the question twice at his ear before the blurred answer came: “Hintza’s nose, feel it . . . feel it quick . . .”
None of it made any sense to her yet; nonetheless, she put up the back of her hand to Hintza’s nose and touched it gently. It seemed an extraordinarily active, almost volcanic nose to her, contracting and expanding in a fantastic manner, presumably to provide Hintza with breath enough to keep him from drowning at the bottom of the deep sea of sleep into which he had plunged. Hintza gave no sign that he had noticed the contact.
“I’ve felt his nose,” she whispered gently in François’s ear, “and I promise you it’s still there, good and intact. So just you sleep on. There’s no need to worry about it, I promise.”
Her answer came near to waking up François completely for his murmur became more agitated than ever, “But what does it feel like?”
“Oh just as it always does; rather cool and perhaps a little damper than usual.”
“Thank God,” François sighed with relief as he vanished, words and all, back into the fullness of his sleep. She was perhaps just a little put out that such a glimmer of awareness contained no recognition of her presence except as a liaison officer to Hintza. But almost immediately François spoke out of his sleep again, “Please, Nonnie, don’t you ever dare to leave me like that again.”
With that a most extraordinary calm came over her and she must have fallen asleep at once. She felt she had slept thus barely a moment before she woke up. The fire was burning brightly. François was up and sitting beside it deep in conversation with Xhabbo. Hintza was hard by them, eating the cold casserole left over for him perhaps not quite as fast as he normally did but nonetheless fast enough. Nuin-Tara too was there tending the fire. Somewhat conscience stricken Nonnie jumped up and joined them, to be greeted not with a polite good-morning but an immediate injunction from François to make them the biggest brew of chocolate possible, with what was left of their chocolate, and to bring them a sackful of rusks as well, because they had to eat, pack up and be off as soon as possible.
The atmosphere was so tense that Nonnie had no difficulty in overlooking any lack of graces. She hurried to do her part as deftly as she could. Once all together round the fire, eating their breakfast, all was made clear in the quick précis François gave her of what Xhabbo had been telling him.
Xhabbo had already been down earlier in the night to the stream in the bed of the valley. It appeared to him that the numbers of their enemies had been greatly reinforced since François’s retreat from the stream. Xhabbo wanted them out of the shelter and on their way, the way of the wind, as soon as the morning star showed itself above the horizon and that would be at any minute now. Xhabbo wanted it because the track they had to follow was clear and distinct enough for them to travel by starlight alone, and he would like them to be at the place where the track met the river before sunrise. The stream there poured over a wide cataract of stone and at this time of the year the water would be so low that they could step from stone to stone across and along the edge of it. Unfortunately it was something they could not do safely in the dark and it would mean that they would have to expose themselves to the danger of being out in the open and visible to anyone who might be sent there to watch. Xhabbo was convinced that the crossing was accordingly best done at first light and done quickly before the enemy could gather in strength in that part of the world.
He, Xhabbo, was not going with them at once. Nuin-Tara would lead them there and take them across the ford, which she had already crossed once with Xhabbo in their race with the enemy towards Hunter’s Drift. He was going down back once more to the bed of the valley to see precisely how their enemy would organise their pursuit of François and Hintza. The moment he knew, he would hasten back to join them. Refreshed as Xhabbo was by good food and the enforced rest in the cave, he was certain it would not take him long to catch up with them.
“But Hin,” Nonnie protested, calling him by his contracted endearment, noticing he was observing her closely and listening carefully, “But Hin, François. D’you think he’s up to going on?”
“Of course he is,” François was somewhat indignant that Hintza’s stamina and courage could be questioned, however lovingly and well-intentioned. “Look at him! Look how he can’t take his eyes off your face. He’s forgotten all about his pain.
And just look at that wonderful scab he’s grown in the night! Feel his nose! If it weren’t for that leg of his, I would say he’s never been in better shape or spirits. Besides, no matter what you say, Nonnie, I’m going to give him pain killers on and off all day while we’re on the move. So there.”
His voice was clear, spirited and almost gaily confident so that Nonnie looked and heard him as much with admiration as with amazement. In fact she could hardly believe that the alert, fresh, although exceedingly fine drawn face looking at her across the fire, was that of the same exhausted person they had helped into the shelter the night before. Moreover the fact that she was going to travel on for once in François’s company and that Xhabbo was taking on the more arduous and dangerous part of the work for a change, lifted her spirits to one of the highest summits of the long range of her feelings. She set about her share of the packing and followed François outside with a heart light as air to take up her position between him and Nuin-Tara.
Then no more words were spoken. Their hands were just raised in a quick farewell to Xhabbo, for the morning star, spear in hand and arrow fitted in its bow, as the Bushmen say, was already straddling the horizon. Nuin-Tara led off fast, to Nonnie’s amazement, without a backward glance to Xhabbo, who had turned about and was making off likewise for the saddle of Lamb-snatcher’s Hill.
CHAPTER NINE
Kwa’mamengalahlwa
DARK AS IT still was, Nonnie and even François were amazed at the certainty and speed with which Nuin-Tara travelled. For all his brave words, François was for a moment uneasy about Hintza. But although still moving on only three legs Hintza, in that cool hour of the day, was keeping up well and, from the way in which his muzzle was searching the air, was resuming some of the duties that were always his when in the bush with François.
The journey to the bank of the river was without drama. The detail of an unknown road was always absorbing to François and Hintza, but all that mattered was that they arrived at the ford just as first light broke, well before the crocodiles could muster for the day. It was an hour so naïve and unthreatened by foreign elements that just a few hundred yards from where they began their dangerous crossing, a well-padded family of hippopotamuses returning from their grazing, without condescending even to glance at them, took to a large pool, stained a brilliant red with the light of a great dawn. On the far bank some white and lilac waterbuck, a vast herd of elegant impala and a lone, majestic sable were drinking up the firewater, lip to lip, from trembling reflections of themselves. The birds were beginning to stir and sing in a way François had not heard them sing for days, in voices that sounded singularly young, pure and acolytic, and they were able therefore to step quietly from stone to stone without haste, making certain of their footing, to music full of a sense of deliverance and devotion. Where the passage of water between one boulder and another was too wide for Hintza to step over the gap, François had more than time enough to pick him up and carry him across.
Just before the sun itself came over the horizon they found themselves back on the track, hidden from human sight by tall reeds and flared papyrus, their tops bright and crackling with vivid electric light. Even so, Nuin-Tara did not stop to rest but led on faster than ever for another mile across the gravelled and stony ground until it found the earth of the bush again. There, obviously afraid of leaving any spoor, she turned aside on the edge of the ridge of stone, and after another quarter of a mile on a curve parallel to the stream found shade and cover thick enough for them to wait for Xhabbo without danger of being observed.
They had barely recovered their breath when from what François judged to be a quarter of a mile away there came the summons of a honey-guide. At once Nuin-Tara was on her feet, giving a faultless rendering of a female honey-guide’s reply to a summons from her male. Back came the confirming answer, and soon there was Xhabbo, sweat running like water down his skin, stepping through the circle of bush and trees towards them.
Nonnie thought a man sweating like that would have had to be out of breath as well. But to her amazement he was not only far from it but also physically at ease enough to begin talking at once, fast and effortlessly. It was another of a horde of indications she was accumulating of her ignorance of the kind of people that Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara really were. To add them all up meticulously in an excellent memory was a basis of an understanding that would match her gratitude and growing love of the two of them.
This was emphasised now by one simple fact she had hitherto done her utmost to repress. On their first encounter with Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara she had been appalled by their smell. Even in their desperate race to the hill and the cave, not knowing what was happening and certain only of the fact that they were in great danger, she yet had had time to be troubled by it. When she realised who Xhabbo was and that he was indeed François’s precious “secret”, she was ashamed of a disappointment which had time to possess her, despite the pressures of a deadly danger, and made her exclaim inwardly, “Dear Mother of God, he stinks! Oh why must he stink so?”
As a result of the sweat running from Xhabbo, this smell in that fresh morning air was sharper than ever. Yet, miracle of miracles, she was no longer appalled by it. It was suddenly something so natural, frank and unashamed that her whole being warmed to it. She thought of it as the kind of smell that could come clinging to the root of some great tree drawn from far down out of the dark, secret soil of Africa, and knew she must be right in her appreciation when she saw how Hintza was relishing it. As the greatest connoisseur, or perhaps the most discriminating gourmet of smell and bouquets in Africa, his nose was stretched out to its uttermost length, taut as a cello string and vibrating as it sought to extract all he could of the rare, beloved smell from the air between himself and Xhabbo, expressing his admiration of its ancient quality by lashing the ground with his tail.
But that was as far as she went with subjective reactions to the occasion, for she could tell, as Xhabbo’s long account to François and Nuin-Tara unfolded, that it was of great and desperate import. So onomatopoeic both in word and meaning was Xhabbo’s language and the tone of his delivery that Nonnie could tell the drift of what he was saying just from the rhythm and the sound and gesticulation.
Xhabbo was in fact describing how he had arrived on the edge of the bush on the banks of the stream in the valley just in time to see the enemy finish breakfasting by large fires. By the light of those fires he saw eleven men take up flasks and fat rucksacks exactly like the ones they were carrying, and come together before a “chief” who addressed them at great length. When the “chief” finished, they were joined by two men who, to his horror, he was certain were Hottentots from the country on the other side of the desert that was his home.
François immediately interrupted and cross-questioned Xhabbo closely why he was so sure the two men were Hottentots, so unlikely did it appear to him. But at the end of his questioning he had to accept that Xhabbo was right, particularly when Xhabbo explained how in the far West, Hottentot desert policemen were often used against his people. This made François as concerned if not afraid as Xhabbo was already, because he knew that in all Africa, only Bushmen excepted, there were no more experienced and inspired trackers of game and men.
Xhabbo continued then to say that a great number of the enemy meanwhile had left their fires, gathered up their belongings and appeared to be assembling to go back the way they had come. He had not stayed long enough to make absolutely certain that his conclusion was right, because he had hardly reached it when the eleven armed men, with the two Hottentots in the lead, started to cross the river in his direction.
At once he retreated up the hill to another place from where he could watch the track below in safety, and observed how the Hottentots, after a remarkably short time, found the track leading out of the river and up to Lamb-snatcher’s Hill. From the way they were examining the track, he knew how right he was to fear them, for soon one Hottentot stood up bright as new copper in the growing light, and called out exulta
ntly to the men behind him. It was obvious to Xhabbo that he had found the kind of special sign they were looking for. He had waited no longer then but left the place, running full out, for it was clear that from then on they had no time to lose.
He had seen enough to know, as his Foot of the Day already knew, that those men were determined to go on looking for spoor and more spoor and would keep on coming after them, until they found and killed them all. They had therefore to start at once, because with those Hottentot trackers and so special and compact a team on their trail, the enemy was now more dangerous than it had ever been.
At this point an old argument broke out again between Xhabbo and François. François thought they had better separate, because the enemy still did not know that there was anybody else to pursue except himself and Hintza. Xhabbo protested and said that coming running, he had thought of nothing but that. He was feeling now that they must not separate on any account. They would be safer and stronger together, should they run into any of their enemies as they might from now on at any moment. He was feeling that they should go back to the track that led in the way of the wind.
Once there, Hintza must go in front, François following and then Nonnie. Both François and Nonnie must take great care to walk over the spoor of Hintza, and Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara, coming last, would take care to walk over the spoor of Nonnie and François. So they would make a kind of blurred spoor which might belong to any of the natural people of the bush who often came and went along such trails. Even if in the end they did not altogether deceive their pursuers, Xhabbo was feeling they could confuse them enough to compel them to travel more slowly than they themselves did.
They had to remember, Xhabbo stressed, that their pursuers would not be their only danger. The way they had to go crossed the great Punda-Ma-Tenka road which the enemy had followed to François’s home. Not only this great road but all the tracks for wide distances around it, judging by what he and Nuin-Tara had seen on their way to warn François, would be full of movement of yet more enemies. It was vital that the five of them should be close to this area when the sun was exactly where he was pointing to the sky.
A Far Off Place Page 27