It looked as if she would collapse and fall to the ground, but once more there was that familiar rush of feet from behind. She found herself gripped by Nuin-Tara, firmly held up, being shaken and she thought in danger of being slapped, unfairly, for hysteria. Then she realised somehow that the shaking was intended to bring her out of herself and to look up at Nuin-Tara. As she did so, she saw a face inclined towards her full of understanding and a pair of deep, dark eyes glowing with experience of the first things of life, and before her own eyes, a long hand, holding out a bulb selected from the supply of tubers they had dug on the previous day’s march. From a great distance, unblurred by the singing of light and heat and fatigue in her ears, she heard François’s slow, measured voice, pleading, ‘“Please take and eat what Nuin-Tara is offering you, Nonnie, it’s terribly good for thirst.”
She took the bulb almost incapable of any show of gratitude and obediently bit into it. Immediately she was amazed by the fresh, clean taste, astringent on her palate and the instant retreat of the parched feeling and re-emergence of moisture in her mouth and throat. And yet that was not the end of the matter. Her tired, rebellious self automatically informed François, stammering with the rush of unpremeditated words, that one miserable tuber might help her thirst but that her legs, muscles, indeed her whole body had definitely, finally and irrevocably come to the end of their day.
“No, Nonnie, no, they have not.” François spoke in what was to her a patronising, deliberate, and totally non-understanding tone. “I promise you, I’ve often felt as you feel now. I know how desperate it is for you. Please, please believe me but if you can’t believe me, believe Mopani and ’Bamuthi who taught me that when you say it’s the end, it only means that you’ve come to the end of what your experience of tiredness believes to be the end of your strength. Just forget all you’ve ever known about tiredness. Just try and go on. You’ll find as Mopani and ’Bamuthi showed me, that there’s no such end inside yourself. They taught me that the only end is an end forced on you from without. There’s no such thing within. You’ve been marvellous, and I know you can go on for as long as necessary.”
Somehow François’s words made her struggle on but they did not deprive her of resentment and incomprehension, and she began reciting to herself with increasingly fierce reiteration, what became, had she but known it, the marching song for another Nonnie as old as life itself, whose existence she had never suspected and who seemed to have taken over her consciously surrendered self. She would mutter to herself, remembering even the character she had hated most in her school Hamlet:
“Damn Moponi, damn!” —the recurrent refrain beat in her head.
“Damn ’Bamuthi, damn!
Damn François Polonius damn!
Damn Polonius François damn!
Damn that son of a schoolmaster, damn!
Damn him for trying to schoolmaster me, damn!”
And so they went on deeper into what is not only the greatest pan François had ever seen, but is perhaps the greatest pan in Africa if not on earth. Far behind them the bush receded into a thick, dark line, and gradually, as the sky became hotter and the air between them and the bush was turned into a trembling, quicksilver smear, the line wavered, was broken, lifted in enlarged bits of itself to be suspended above what looked like a sea of flaming water. On the far rim of the pan ahead of them the line of a vast tumult of dunes, covered with bush and strange thorn trees looked deceptively near, as if they were only a few hours’ marching, instead of nearly two days away. And for all his confident words to Nonnie, François, looking into his own exhausted self and to Hintza labouring in front, became profoundly and acutely afraid.
For he realised at once where they were. This was the great desert plain which ’Bamuthi and all his Matabele teachers had warned him all men should fear, because it was so far away and wide, desolate and uninhabited, that when men came to it their hearts cried out loud, “Kwa’mamengalahlwa—Oh mother, I am lost!”
He sought and found comfort as he always did in the presence of Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara, knowing that this immense wasteland was merely the doorstep of home to them. And his comfort was sustained by the unwavering, confident way Xhabbo was leading them. So suddenly he was forced to realise that perhaps it was not this plain that was troubling him, however fearful his Matabele teachers had tried to make it for him, but some undefinable other thing.
Impulsively he turned about to look apprehensively behind them. He was amazed to see Xhabbo turning about simultaneously and was moved, more than he could put into articulate thought, at how their two spirits seemed always in communication and accord at levels beyond need of words. The little line came to a stop. Hintza, Nuin-Tara and Nonnie turned about too and likewise looked fearfully behind them as if afraid of being followed. Their spoor stretched out in an alarmingly clear, deeply etched and, of course, easily discernible line to where half a mile away it was lost in the glare. They all stood looking deeply into the glare as into a great crystal, and though they could see nothing, François was certain that they were all as uneasy as he was, particularly since Hintza had lifted his head and was giving him a look which only François knew was Hintza’s way of intimating he had a hunch that even this new world was about to turn against them.
They remained there on watch like that for some ten minutes. Then Xhabbo, with a shrug of his shoulders, not reassured but clearly determined not to allow the lack of perfection in their awareness to be an enemy of what good he could accomplish at the moment, announced that there was no point just then in going on, and that he would lead them to a place nearby for rest.
He turned sideways into what seemed to François just another empty blaze of light where the sturdy nimble body, close as it was to him, was reflected on the shining air as in a distorting mirror. Soon they came to a shallow hollow in the pan, surrounded by a wide fringe of tall, brown, almost burned-out reeds which came alive there when the rains fell. They threw a kind of shadow that was more a paler form of sunlight, but, nonetheless, was shelter of a sort and sifted the heat and glare into a finer grain. Xhabbo threw down his pack almost in anger, and told the rest to follow his example.
CHAPTER TEN
Pillar of Fire
IT WAS LATE afternoon when François was woken by Hintza, amazed how he could have slept so soundly in so hot a place. Hintza appeared to have woken François for no specific reason, except that Xhabbo was awake and on his feet and that his eyes showed him to be as full of unspecified apprehension as ever.
François sat up and looked around him. Nonnie and Nuin-Tara were fast asleep side by side, so he stood up without a sound and carefully went over to join Xhabbo. The glare and distortion had gone from the day. It was cooler; the scene again spread out clear and precise. Xhabbo was pointing without speaking in the direction from which they had come. There, where the dark line of the distant bush had once more been restored to the earth, just at the point where François reckoned they had emerged from the bush in the early hours of the morning, a blue column of smoke stood tall and straight.
His eyes had barely located it when the still, early evening air over the pan began to tremble with a strange kind of intensive vibration. The vibration became a definite sound. The sound increased and made Xhabbo look questioningly at François, as if it were the sort of noise which François ought to recognise and not he, Xhabbo, be expected to name. Indeed, within moments the noise was substantiated. High in the sky there appeared an aeroplane, translucent, blue and silver against that long, level light, and heading straight for the smoke.
François had no doubt, as Hintza and even Xhabbo, who knew nothing about aeroplanes, appeared to have none either, that smoke in such a place could only have been sent up and was being maintained by their pursuers for the benefit of the plane. He was certain at once that the Hottentots and other searchers must have found their spoor in the course of the day and tracked it to where it emerged in the open, where they could not fail to watch it running out straight across the pan
as they themselves had seen it in their moment of desperation in the morning. They stood there, appalled to see their fears confirmed, for when the plane arrived above the pillar of smoke it circled it several times and then came streaking towards them.
Their situation seemed to François nearer his sphere of knowledge than Xhabbo’s. After all, Ouwa and Mopani had been through a world war together and told him a great deal about it, and he did not hesitate to resume command and tell Xhabbo that they had better join the women and take cover in that ring of reeds as quickly as possible. Once in cover it was vital, he explained, that none of them should look up at the sky, because he remembered both Ouwa and Mopani stressing that it was unbelievable how faces and eyes not only of human beings but of animals shone almost like mirrors from the ground to anyone watching from a plane above. He assured Xhabbo that he himself would do whatever watching was necessary by lying on his back, shading his face with his wide-brimmed bush hat and keeping his hands carefully concealed inside its brim. Xhabbo accepted all this without question, and almost at once was beside Nuin-Tara who was already stirring.
Nonnie, her face still flushed from the heat of the day, was still deep in her sleep and looked so at home and at peace in it now that the fire had gone from the atmosphere round her that it hurt François to wake her. He was more than hurt when she came out of her sleep too startled to be really aware of what was happening and still joined to the rebellious, overwrought self with which she had gone to sleep.
“Oh go away!” she exclaimed. “Leave me alone. I hate you all and I just won’t go on.”
Muttering wildly she became fully awake to see a surprised and wounded look on François’s face, thin, drawn with all he had endured plainly inscribed on it and despite the rest, eyes great and bright with underlying weariness. Her resentment vanished and it was all that she could do not to burst into tears.
“Oh François, forgive me please, dear François,” she pleaded, contrite, “I was only talking in my sleep. What is it, please? Do forgive me and take that stricken deer look off your face, at once, please! And tell me what it’s about. I didn’t mean one word of what I said.”
François immediately was his unwounded self and explained that all he wanted was for her to creep right into the reeds, turn over and lie on her tummy with her face on her arms until he told her not to.
“Oh what bliss!” Nonnie exclaimed, apparently too tired to be alarmed, “As long as we’re not to go on walking again, I can lie here until the end of time. What bliss . . .”
Immediately she crawled forward, turned over and snuggled down to earth, her head in her arms, leaving François, whose foreboding was so full and acute that heartened as he was by her show of spirit, he feared she might have been provocatively flippant. But he left the thought there because already the aeroplane seemed to have arrived over the spot where Xhabbo had branched off from the main line of their spoor in the morning to lead them to their shelter among the reeds.
François, who had been as conscious as any of the long hours they had marched across the pan, and had been convinced that they had come extremely far, was dismayed how the distance was demolished by the realisation that it had only been a few minutes since they had first heard the aeroplane come out of the sky over the bush and its arrival almost overhead. He lay there on his back, sombre with the thought that this was something quite outside his and Xhabbo’s calculations. With aeroplanes and trucks at their enemy’s command, no matter how fast and hard they themselves marched, their pursuers could easily out-speed and out-distance them. Once again their only safety would be in finding cover as soon as possible. But cover, where, and how? And, above all, would they be allowed the time to make it?
He completed this desperate conclusion just in time to see out of the corner of his shaded eyes, the aeroplane appearing from the right and speeding towards the bed of reeds. It moved across his direct vision, disappeared out of the corner of his eyes to the left and, presumably having found that their spoor did not emerge on the far side of the reeds, returned and circled their hiding place, gradually coming down closer and closer in a spiral until it could not have been more than a hundred feet above them. Then it started re-ascending in tight circles until François judged it had achieved the height of Lamb-snatcher’s Hill above them. There a bright light shot out from its nose, soared straight up to explode high in the blue and release a dark cloud of smoke. That done, the aeroplane vanished again to the right, François hoped for good, but in a moment he heard it coming back and low towards them. When the searing noise was almost above them, the pan all around them suddenly came alive, shaking and spurting upwards. There followed immediately a rattle-tattle, quick, sharp, and the earth beneath shook as with the thud of hail, audible above the screaming engines. The air was filled with dust and a mist of the finest fragments of shattered and pounded reeds. The violent process ceased as abruptly as it had begun. The engines receded away to the left. Dust and a fog of pulverised reeds and dust descended on them; so thick that a loud sneeze of protest burst out of Hintza. It was greeted by a muffled, “Bless you, Hin!” from Nonnie—a reaction which struck François as one of the bravest of many brave incidents of the day.
Then he heard the plane streaking back again. Once more the machine-gunning, as François had recognised it to be, began. He heard himself shouting the obvious platitudes that serve disaster, while his hand firmly held down Hintza, who was stirring full of desire for action beside him.
“For God’s sake, Nonnie, don’t move, this is no joke . . . they’re machine-gunning us. Xhabbo, Nuin-Tara, please don’t move or look up!”
The machine-gunning was repeated six times right and left of them before the aeroplane zoomed upwards sharply. The nose of its engines faded the way it had come. François felt it safe to sit up. He looked about him amazed. The others sat up too, apparently untouched. It had all happened so fast that, like them, he had had no time to be truly frightened. But now that it was over, he realised how shocked he must have been, for he was drunk with exhilaration that they had all come through safely.
“You know, Hin,” he said to Hintza in Bushman, “I don’t think that aeroplane ever saw us, or we would have been hit. He was just shooting wildly for luck. Our real trouble, I fear, is still to come.”
Getting up he went over to join the others, who appeared far more excited with curiosity over what had happened than concerned with the danger they had survived, except Xhabbo. He was not only on his feet but pointing with his spear to the far side of the ring of reeds, a complex half-smile not just of amusement but of rare compassion subtle on his face.
A desert fox and his vixen were standing by the hole in the sand that was their home nearby. Their coats were lit and gleaming and their keen shapes, enclosed in a ring of fire drawn from the setting sun. Their expressions betrayed indignation at so brutal an interruption of a siesta essential to all who dined so late at night.
François had to smile as well and, more than smiling, was touched in his tenderest feelings when the foxes, after a time, turned to look at them without fear but for evident support of their feeling that they were justified in resenting so vulgar an intrusion. So neighbourly was the long, frank regard from their intelligent faces that it was almost as if François could hear them thinking, “What have we done to deserve all this? The natural order must be crumbling if this sort of thing can be allowed.”
“Look, Foot of the Day,” he heard Xhabbo saying beside him. “Feeling yourself to be looking, feel also how here, where on their heels upright walking Xhabbo’s people have always come and gone without fear, even the foxes who hide by day feel as we do and that we are not alone.”
It was as if the Ishmael in Xhabbo were honouring the Ishmael that these foxes were in the animal world. François was more moved than ever. He remembered the voice of his father far back, re-telling him at his request the story of Ishmael, and the words of Hagar, his mother, which for a reason he had not yet discovered had held his imagination. �
�Even here in the desert have I seen God and lived after my vision.”
And his father had spoken the words somehow as Xhabbo had done now, as the exile in himself speaking for all that is exiled in life. He stood there thus until the foxes turned back to their hole not to enter it but to lie down at the entrance, as if to watch the skies at their ease in case the intruders returned. Only then did he reluctantly move away. He moved because what he had thought was a great distance between them and the enemy with aeroplanes at its command, was no distance at all, and the attack had impressed him deeply with the need for immediate action.
He and Xhabbo were at once in consultation. François’s fear of pursuit by trucks across the pan was dismissed out of hand by Xhabbo. He assured François that there was no road or way at all from the Punda-Ma-Tenka to the pan; only the thickest of bush pierced by a few narrow game tracks like the one they had followed the night before.
Xhabbo was certain that the greatest danger now was that the men who had just been shooting at them would tell the Hottentots where the spoor ended and that the Hottentots would soon be sent out across the pan after them. They themselves must hasten towards the great dunes ahead of them. Once in those dunes, Xhabbo assured François, they could hide and make themselves invisible from above or below and hard to trace, and after no more than another day they would be safe, because no one except he would know where there was water.
“But how long will it take us to reach the dunes, Xhabbo?” François asked anxiously. “I think I can just go on as long as necessary but I’m not sure that Hin and Nonnie can go much further without more rest.”
François’s tone was as apologetic as it was anxious. He knew from old Koba what a strict code of ethics ruled Bushman conduct in moments of grave crisis such as this. He knew, for instance, that when the old people, no matter how beloved and honoured, were not strong enough to keep up the pace of movement necessary for the survival of their clan, they offered without prompting to stay behind, and the clan, however reluctant and sad, would be compelled to abandon them to certain death, so that not only the clan but life itself could move on and survive. The urge to be knightly was natural and instinctive in all men and not the monopoly of civilisation. He felt compelled to tell Xhabbo that perhaps the moment had come when Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara should move on and leave himself and Nonnie and Hintza behind.
A Far Off Place Page 30