Suddenly François found himself shutting his eyes on a command from within and murmuring, as he had so often done from his earliest days at Hunter’s Drift, the psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd,” right through to the verse “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .” Knowing how much in the shadow of death they had all walked for days, his seared, vulnerable and bereaved heart was suddenly full and brimming over with an immense thank-you. Hard on this he was close to tears, because a hope so great that it nearly persuaded him it was a certainty, cried for recognition, newly born out of the total wreck of all that had hitherto passed for hope in his experience. The pillar of fire and smoke at once became a sign for him to hasten.
Shouldering his haversack, ammunition pouches, and buckling his field flask into position, his rifle at the trail, he started at his long-distance run down the bed of the stream after his vanished friends. And for the first time since the massacre, he did not pause once to look back.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Voice of the Lion
THE SUN HAD just set when François caught up with Hintza, Nonnie, Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara. Although they must have been warned long since by Hintza of his coming and could not have failed to hear him hurrying up behind, he was impressed by the fact that they were also travelling as fast as they could without looking back. They did not stop until he caught up with them. If he had needed any proof of how at one they had all become, this solitary fact would have been conclusive. Also they could not have failed to hear the explosion of the helicopter. Despite the cleft, and distance in between, they must have turned then to see that pillar of fire in the sky. They could not have known except through Xhabbo’s tapping, that the fire and smoke and the violence to which they had testified had not brought about François’s own end as well. Yet they had kept faith and pressed on as he had begged Xhabbo to do. He was delighted therefore, that in explaining his conduct he could prove how justified was their faith in one another. As a result they spent their most carefree night yet and experienced briefly a state as near to real happiness as people so afflicted could possibly achieve.
For once they could choose a site and make camp together at their leisure and rest without immediate anxieties of any kind, only a few yards from where François had caught up with them. They slept soundly in their beds of sand. François, with greater natural ease and relaxation, was helped in this because both Hintza on one side of him and Nonnie on the other seemed to find a level of sleep without pain, foreboding or retrospective sorrow and so established a rhythm of communication between them as precious as it was deep.
Happiest of all, early in the morning when he and Xhabbo told Nuin-Tara and Nonnie to stay where they were and cook another casserole while they hurried up towards the top of the dunes not far away, Hintza himself, with eyes clear of pain, a nose shining and active as ever, obviously taking it for granted that he was to be the vital part of the exercise, reported to François as usual for duty.
But François held up a finger and shook it gently at him, before telling him in Bushman with great tact that it was his duty to stay behind and protect the women. Hintza saw through François’s white lie at once, put up a paw to scratch a protest with his claws against François’s leg. It was something that he had not done for days, and indeed could not have done because of his wounded leg. But now that he was scratching away until his protest got through, François was compelled to look down. He was amazed to see that however tentative and still somewhat trembling from the stiffness and ache of it, Hintza’s wounded leg was propped on the sand and making his attitude of protest possible.
For François this was so speedy and miraculous a cure, and so powerful had been his fears for Hintza, that his joy was irrespressible. He shouted out aloud, “Oh look Nonnie, look, his leg . . . look, his leg! Xhabbo, Nuin-Tara . . . look at his leg . . . look!”
Nonnie did not say, “Why, what about his leg, it’s still there,” as she might have done out of her incorrigible and even to her at times incomprehensible love of teasing François, because for her too it was miraculous. Had she not herself looked with blurred eyes into the raw, red wound? She clasped her hands with delight in front of her, before doing a graceful curtsey to Hintza saying, while Hintza dribbled at the mouth with satisfaction, “Oh Hin! Of all the dogs in the world you are king, and I, Luciana Monckton, the least of your subjects.”
Hintza was encouraged in this and other ways to stay behind with relative composure while François and Xhabbo hastened by themselves to the dunes. They reached the summit of one of the highest, well before the air over the pan was too hot to distort the view. From that height they looked to where the bush some forty miles away lapped like the shadow of a great water at the edge of the orange pan. No matter how minutely they searched the scene, they detected no sign of pursuit. Only once as they lay there had they cause for apprehension. They heard the familiar noise of an aeroplane coming up fast across the pan on a line some miles away to the north. They watched it circle over the ashes of the cremated helicopter. After circling low over the place for some fifteen minutes it turned about and vanished the way it had come.
And that, Xhabbo decided, once more in command, was their that. He declared himself now, with a firmness which surprised François, for the first time utterly without fear of pursuit. For safety’s sake, however, one of them would have to stay on watch on the dune all day, but there was no need for them to move from that well-shaded, well-found camp of theirs. Unless the day provided anything untoward, they could get the rest there which they all needed so badly, before they travelled on.
They stood watch on the dune in turns until close on sunset. No aeroplane or aircraft appeared to trouble the desert calm, no dust rose out of the pan to suggest pursuit on foot, and they ended the day with the conclusion that the enemy had finally called off pursuit as vain; abandoned it perhaps all the more readily because they felt that what they had failed to do, the great thirst-land would accomplish instead.
Early the next morning, after another night of untroubled sleep, they prepared to go on in the way of the wind from which the events of the last two days had forced them to deviate. Although Xhabbo had no fear that they were still being followed by the enemy, it was typical of a thoroughness that explains the survival of his people against millenniums of persecution by nature and man, that he insisted on one last reconnaissance of the land behind him from the top of the dune.
François volunteered immediately and Nonnie, who knew enough already from the general trend of Bushman sounds if not actual words, to guess what he intended, clamoured to go with him. Hintza neither clamoured nor volunteered but just calmly took it for granted that he was to be the spearhead of the excursion and had already moved off in the direction of the dune to the edge of the river-bed which had been their camp, and there turned round to look expectantly to see why Nonnie and François were so slow in following. Impressed as François had been by the progress of Hintza’s wound, he was not impressed enough to allow Hintza to test it on a steep climb in deep sand through grass, thorn and other forms of resistant bush for some three hundred feet up into the blue. Hintza’s instant reproach for which he had a special genius as always had the effect of shaking François’s faith in his own decisions and made him uneasy with guilt, and yet he managed to insist. Injured in his male pride, as if unfairly condemned to a prison sentence, Hintza attached himself to Xhabbo, like someone who had changed allegiance for good.
It was Nonnie’s first excursion for excursion’s sake with François since her return from Europe, and François’s unusually relaxed manner, free as he was of any immediate danger, gave an immense lift to her spirits. Now that she was physically rested, she was perhaps more eager than she knew to move on and away from a vast area of injury.
The view from the top of the dune over the pan left her speechless, which was all the more remarkable in one so articulate. The sun had only just risen and François could point out to her precisely the way they had
come across the pan to where, far away, the bush cancelled the shining, vacant space in between with a determined slash of ink, and there, beyond and above the bush, away to the south-east and to the right, just on the horizon, was the purple shadow of the gorge and the hills leading up to the mound of blue with its crown of yellow sunlight that was Lamb-snatcher’s Hill. More, even further to the right, the range of hills continued, in spite of repeated interruptions by minor clefts and gorges to the hill above Hunter’s Drift and below it, a silver streak of the broad Amanzim-tetse river.
“Have we really come all that distance, François?” she asked, not believing her own eyes, “Could I really have walked and run all that way? I don’t believe it! It all just feels part of a nightmare of sleep.”
She stared at him with the questions so ardent that they made her dark, wide eyes brighter than ever and gave her a look so young, innocent and vulnerable that François felt as old and experienced as Mopani and as protective as he was moved.
He put his left hand on her shoulder, to say, “No Nonnie, no. It’s neither a nightmare nor illusion. You’ve done it all and it’s one of the most remarkable things anybody has ever done. Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo only last night told me how much they admire you for the way you’ve kept up and how testing they found the journey themselves. I’m sorry I had to be so rough with you, but I always knew, I promise you, that you could do it. I can’t tell you what I feel about the way you did it. Had you panicked or fallen out, it would have been disastrous for us all. But you were just wonderful.”
Nonnie indeed had never experienced anything so sweet as the effect produced in her by such praise. She was immediately convinced that she could do a dozen journeys like that, one after the other, if they ended in a welcome so warm into the select company of François, Xhabbo, Nuin-Tara and all those who had run races with death in the long story of man and for whom François and his two friends were for her such shining plenipotentiaries in the present. She resolved there and then that she would keep the memory of this moment alive not merely as constant reminder of what she could do but also in order that whenever she had to go through other trials, as no doubt they would have to, it would spur her on with some foretaste of the reward that awaits those who endure to the true end of chance and circumstance.
Not daring to look at him she felt as a result that her response was totally inadequate: “You made me do it, Coiske! It was all you and your beloved Hintza, of course. He had not just that ghastly wound but himself to carry on only three legs. I can’t tell you how the sight of him struggling on in front, hour after hour, frothing at the mouth and never a whimper, made me ashamed of my weakness and gave me new determination.”
Fortunately for her self-possession, François changed the subject, because even emotions as good and healing as those alive between them just then tended to set off a train of other dark, hurt, deprived and powerful feelings still waiting at his and Nonnie’s door for admission.
With disconcerting abruptness he became the matter-of-fact scout Xhabbo expected him to be, declaring, “I wonder, Nonnie, if you agree, but I cannot see a single sign of anything moving across the pan or even smoke at the far edge. I think they’ve given up, don’t you?”
Nonnie, also relieved, perhaps for similar reasons, after another dutiful examination of the pan, remarked with an upward turn of voice, “Thou hast the reason of it, François Joubert, as your ancestors would have said.”
And still François, with no rational cause for going on examining the land taut and just beginning to tremble beneath the blue, found himself reluctant to take his eyes off it. Having pin-pointed the whole scene, he just could not bear to turn away from that glimpse of his much loved Amanzim-tetse, the familiar flash of a rushing, forever either murmuring, roaring or singing but always, whatever the mood, the Lady Precious Stream of his first memories. The beauty invested in all, even the most trivial of things, when one believes oneself to be looking on them for the last time, overwhelmed him.
He knew that Xhabbo would be waiting and that the purpose for which they had mounted the dune was achieved and that they should now return. Yet he was plunged into a conflict that made his heart beat faster and his eyes in danger of smarting with tears. So violent was the rupture in his feelings caused by the imperative need to turn away, that it resounded in his spirit not like the firm turning over of a page that it should ideally have been, but as the sound of one torn from the story of his life and thrown crumpled, away. He found himself, in the process, transferring to Nonnie words that were really intended for himself.
“Promise me Nonnie, promise me!” His voice startled her with its vehemence. “You’ll never look back again! We must promise each other here and now that we’ll never look back and that all we see now spread out before us is once and for all to be put behind. All that matters now is what Xhabbo calls the way of the wind, in front of us.”
Saying this he turned swiftly about, taking Nonnie’s compliance for granted. A shadow was in her dark eyes. The lively, lovely young face was suddenly sombre as if she had been asked too much to accept at once. She gulped and asked, almost inaudibly, “Isn’t it perhaps a bit too soon, François, for us to promise that?”
“No! It’s never too soon,” François went on, still in a rough process of admonishing himself by heaping admonishment on Nonnie. “If you could have asked ’Bamuthi and Mopani, they would have told you at once that it’s a bad, bad thing—perhaps the worst thing in life, to go on looking back on misery and destruction in the past. You should hear Mopani on the subject, expanding on what happened to Lot’s wife as an example. And I wish you could have heard ’Bamuthi tell you his endless stories of beautiful young Matabele girls and splendid warriors who were overpowered by supernatural forces because they didn’t heed the warning not to look back.”
Nonnie thought that she knew what he meant. Yet it sounded all too wilful and heartless at such a moment to be true. She knew that François was far from a heartless person. So perhaps all this was just a sign of the hurt and tragedy speaking in him, to impress him with the need to move on into a part of himself where they did not exist.
Accordingly she touched him for a moment with her hand, to say in a low voice, without daring to look into his eyes, “Whatever I may feel, I can promise you one thing. I may not be able to forget all at once but I can promise you my eyes will never, never look back again. There!”
Her tone was forced out of her lighter self and she whisked about as if to start obediently down the dune in order to move away and on, but François stopped her.
Filled with gratitude he pleaded, “Not so fast, Nonnie, just hold on a moment! It may help to look at what’s in front of us.”
Nonnie obediently looked and had her first close and comprehensive view of the desert. Despite her first liberating sunset intimation of it from Lamb-snatcher’s Hill, she was totally unprepared for such a view and her eyes, though full, clear and steady, were strangely unbelieving. She of course had never seen anything comparable and neither indeed had François, until the morning before when he had come to that place with Xhabbo, and neither of them had any words ready for what it did to them. Silent, they surveyed the immense wasteland unfolding to the south, to the west and to the north of them in one great heaving expanse of land, like a sea caught in some equinoctial tidal pull.
It was more open and wide than any country François had ever seen. But most exciting of all was the fact that it did not look like a desert at all, because the fertile sand was covered with grass, bush, brush and enormous spreading thorn and acacia trees. The wide troughs in between the swell of great dunes were vast level stretches that Nonnie could only think of as natural parkland with great trees, so high, wide, handsome and well-spaced were they. And what was more, in that light, since the rains over the desert showed no sign of breaking the grass was bleached, and the bushes and trees shone and the sand in between looked so satiny and of so pale a yellow that basically it was platinum blond. By contrast it made t
he shrill green of the broom bushes, the dark witch-holly of the ipi-hamba thorn, the tall, spreading giraffe acacia and storm trees sparkle and shine like the olives and ilexes of some privileged classical scene. Never before had either Nonnie or François believed that the sky could accomplish so high, wide and flawless a dome with the proportion of earth so reduced and that of the blue so increased, as the one imposed on the firm horizon in front of them.
Yet it was not just desert, however fertile, nourishing grass, bush and trees to express some unique green thought of their own in their own green shade. It was also dedicated to other equally revered forms of life, for a great choir of birds was singing close by them and other birds taking up the song below their dune to be joined by greater and rarer voices far away. Not even in the earliest days at Hunter’s Drift before the birds had changed their tune, had François heard such singing just for singing’s sake, nor seen trees and grass and bushes so single with purpose just for being’s sake. And wherever he looked great birds rose effortlessly on the wing and the flashes of feathers of many colours made fire out of the shadows between one bush, one tree and one spread of grass and another. At the heart of the glittering bird song he distinctly heard the impassioned outpouring of giant bustards to their mates while scarlet bee-eaters, peacock blue Abyssinian rollers, golden aurioles and lacquered starlings, drew a swift Tartar pattern of the music in their flight. Every now and then some male ostrich from the base of his long throat boomed a patriarchal note of blessing and in the rare intervals of silence in the overall community singing came the call of the dove especial to the desert: small, neat, precise in figure, and immaculate in a dress of mauve and purple with a buff cravat held in a jade-black ring to a delicate throat, a throat always on fire with a phrase that Xhabbo and his people called “po-por-ri”. Indeed it had made them name the bird itself the “Po-per-ri” bird and they valued it precisely because this phrase, round as a magic circle, was believed to be the call that their beloved mystical eland (of whom François had no doubt there were vast herds concealed in the dunes beyond), once had followed to a store of honey without end. So the Bushmen who came after in the clicking electric footsteps of the great antelope, were enabled to commune with bird and beast in the transubstantiation of the honey into the sweetness of wisdom itself. But above all the view was unpolluted; not just free of the unnatural smog human beings inflict on the earth they inhabit, but in the more subtle and profound sense that it had never even suffered the intrusion of sophisticated minds and civilised eyes, acute and slanted with calculation of how to exploit it for their own uses. Indeed, it was so uncontaminated by anything that was unnatural, was so much an expression of creation for creation’s sake, that spread out as it was in the elegaic early morning with a light that fell upon it like the tongues of fire wherein the authentic spirit of creation had first come to comfort a small group of bereaved and frightened people in a moment of great darkness in Palestine. There was something sacred about it. Both François and Nonnie became so full of awe that they shrank from troubling it with the sound of their own voices.
A Far Off Place Page 32