François perhaps was more fortunate than Nonnie because he had an example to help him contain the impact the view made on him. He remembered Mopani repeatedly telling him that perhaps the greatest experiences of his life had been the privilege of setting eyes on country which no other European or African had ever seen, and for which he himself had not been prepared for mentally in any way whatsoever by his upbringing. The new land, therefore, could present itself purely as itself to him. When that happens, Mopani stressed, one is amazed how one’s inner self responds, as if it too until that moment had been some unknown and undiscovered country, and for the first time had a mirror in which it can both see its reflection and recognise the love and infinite care of detail with which both oneself and one’s mirror has been made. It was, Mopani would say, almost as if coming to country uncontaminated by the mind and will of other men, one is not just exhilarated by seeing something new, but feels for the first time what it could mean to be oneself, how much of a child of life in one’s own right one is; how much a ward in a great all-embracing chancery with a rich and lawful inheritance of one’s own spread out before one.
Nonnie had no such guide and was made to feel singularly small and powerless in the face of it all, as one does alone on the wide veld with a great thunderstorm bearing down on one. More, she had an added complication that was more devastating because although her eyes could take in the beauty, the delicacy and the sanctity of the scene, it was almost as if her reaction stopped short there and refused to let these things enter her heart and there become transformed into feelings. For the first time in her life she could see and register beauty with her mind and yet not feel it. And since it was the first time she was without any standards of comparison, she could not suspect that her feelings, still too wounded and withdrawn to turn to the world without, might be the cause. All she had of creative feeling, was needed to nurse the stricken aspects within. This suspended dislocation of heart and mind became almost more than she could bear, and somehow she had to put a limit to it all as best she could. She asked François urgently, “Surely all this comes to an end somewhere and can’t go on for as long as it looks from here?”
She was amazed to hear François answer her frankly in terms of fear.
“I’m afraid, Nonnie—” he was suddenly his solemn self again—“it goes on like this from here for some fifteen hundred to two thousand miles where it ends in the sea.”
Resenting an ignorance which made her feel reprehensibly naïve with astonishment, she exclaimed, “Dear God, how do we ever get out of it then? And if we do, how long will it take?”
François, whose fear had not been the fear of distance or the hazards that might lie ahead, so much as fear of how Nonnie would react when she realised how far they were then from the outside world and help, hastened to say: “Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara will get us out of here all right!”
He said this confidently enough, though he withheld the one reservation that all depended on their not running into the enemy where the desert impinged on a vast green swamp, the rivers that made it and the fertile African settlements of the Portuguese colony to their north and the newly emancipated British African states to the south-west. He added as casually as he could, “It all depends on how we get on for food and water, and how fast we go, but I dare say a year or fourteen months ought to see us out of it.”
Seeing the look of profound agitation on Nonnie’s face he tried to make light of it all, quickly adding, “Just long enough for you to learn Bushman and become a good honorary Bushman woman yourself.”
What would François have turned to say had he known the real cause of Nonnie’s agitation? He might have been inclined to think her flippant and not adequately prepared in her mind for so strenuous a journey. Luckily she was determined that he should have no inkling of the cause of her dismay. But had he been more experienced, he would have had a suspicion from the quick, searching, panicky way in which she looked herself up and down and took in every detail of how stained with sweat, dust and even mud her own slacks and matching bush-shirt had become. The clothes she had so carefully chosen for what was to be her first joyful excursion with François into the bush on her return, had been tailor-made for the occasion and, road-worthy as they were, had been a tribute to the Paris fashion-house that had designed them.
Having taken in all this detail and signs of early wear and tear, the terrible thought which came to her can be summed up in an inward exclamation, “A year or fourteen months—heavens, what am I to wear?”
Flippant as this may have sounded aloud, it is perhaps regrettable that Nonnie did not give François the chance of seeing that this remark would not have been possible were it not for her trust in him, Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara. It could have proved to him how neither the distance before them nor time were bothering Nonnie, but that it was a consequence of having come through their ordeal with her fastidious self intact, and concerned to be at her best in the days to come.
Nonnie came out of this concern as fast as she had gone into it. François was still standing before her, his dismay over her moment of agitation plain on his face. Determined as ever not to let him know the cause of it but nonetheless somewhat remorseful for having perturbed him, she felt compelled to take the initiative.
“You know, François, there was a Chinese Mopani once,” she said, her eyes sparkling with mischief, “who says that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Now, who’s going to take the first step of this monstrous journey, you or I?”
François, less sure than ever what to make of it, was still thinking up an appropriate answer when Nonnie said, “I see, ladies first as usual,” and without waiting for him started fast down the hill and so was the first to be welcomed by Hintza.
From there they started at once on the firm bed of what must once have been one of the greatest rivers of Africa—a river which no doubt had made a great lake of the immense pan behind them. On either side of them dunes rose some two to three hundred feet in height and yet the bed of the stream was so wide that they had no sense of being shut in so much as following a broad corridor leading to the freedom of that frank and full confession of space and earth they had seen from above. This feeling of being guided by the earth itself was heightened by the behaviour of Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara. The farther they travelled along the dry river-bed, the more cheerful the two of them became, as if this were not the forbidding lost world, the extension of the Kwa’mamengalahlwa that European and Bantu senses had warned François to expect, but a well-beloved drive of some stately home in the country and they a pair of dispossessed proprietors returning for good from exile to reclaim their unfairly sequestrated possessions.
More and more they would stop and point out familiar bushes and trees and landmarks to each other and at one place threw themselves on an outcrop of smooth stone, patted it with their hands, pressed their cheeks against it, fondled it as if it were some beloved living thing and flesh and blood and stone joined in an act of reconciliation. Nonnie was amazed to see for the first time tears bright as beads on Nuin-Tara’s apricot cheeks and finally abolished all her reservations about the capacity for composure of Xhabbo’s “utterly woman” which had seemed so great at times as to make her suspect it of being inhuman. Clearly all these things were honoured in their imagination not only because they had been experienced before but were also dignified in stories, legends and myths that coloured any event of their unobserved desert lives.
At one point, Xhabbo stopped and showed them what was clearly a partially filled-in hole. There he told them when he was a little boy they had dug up the greatest tuber recorded in Bushman history—a tuber so great that it had kept them in food and water for four whole days; a tuber so magical that all the Bushmen of his own age who had witnessed it were known throughout the Bushman land as the men of the tuber. His eyes shone and his whole manner was lively and excited and he seemed as if he could not stretch his arms wide enough to indicate the size of the miraculous plant and even his quick a
nd adroit tongue not nimble enough to convey the sharp click of the lash of wonder the event still inflicted on his eager imagination. Though neither Nonnie nor François could have made a concept out of their reactions, there was a profound reappraisal of values implicit for them both in this, considering that the discovery of a new plant was chosen from all other candidates to set its seal upon a whole generation of Xhabbo’s people. Whereas in Nonnie’s Europe, and even the African world of François’s childhood, some man-made melodrama or horrific event would have been preferred as milestones on their road through time.
This was the first of many examples that made Nonnie realise how the vast wasteland she had allowed into her mind from the top of the dune that morning, was home to them, and however much one plant, dune and bush tended to look like all the others to her, they were all different and individual and that each difference was acknowledged and honoured, even sanctified, in the spirit of Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara, so that an extraordinary atmosphere of all-belonging enfolded them. François himself, better prepared than Nonnie in this regard, nonetheless was more impressed than he could have imagined possible by the feeling Xhabbo gave him that not only had he and Nuin-Tara this specific relationship with the country into which they were moving but also that in some very strange way, the country down to the smallest of its multitudinous detail appeared to reciprocate it.
The excitement of this feeling rose rapidly. He was being evoked in the completely new way Mopani had so often described to him. That he was not being fanciful or in any way deluding himself seemed confirmed by Hintza’s behaviour. Hintza looked more like Hintza than he had ever done, growing in stature by the mile until he was, incredible as it might appear, more of a natural dog than he had ever been before. At times François smiled to himself at the proprietory airs Hintza gave himself and the proud, assertive way he scouted around them as if he had known and experienced it all before.
As for Nonnie, everything in the world of François’s bush had in any case started out by being so different and remote from her sophisticated upbringing that this part of the journey at first tended to be only an extension of the newness of Africa for her. But as the tiredness and the memory of tragedy, danger and fear was suspended, she too became increasingly aware of differences within the difference. Somehow something hitherto unsuspected within herself was beginning to emerge and become drawn into harmony with the new world about her.
This other dimension was enlarged and enriched by the fact that she was fast learning a new language as well. François had already been amazed by the ease with which she had picked up Bushman words and how accurately her tongue managed the difficult clicking consonants—an achievement that would have been remarkable at any time, but was all the more so when one considers the terrible circumstances in which she had had her first lessons. Almost from the start of their new march towards the interior along the way of Xhabbo’s wind, nothing new was allowed to pass without her insisting on being told the Bushman words for it and then marching on, muttering to herself again and again the new words and phrases like an aspiring actress learning her lines for her first main role in a great new play.
But all these and many other more subtle, and almost inexpressible nuances of meaning associated with these changes found a natural voice to speak for them at their camp that night. Although it had not been a hurried march, it was a long march and they travelled far. Xhabbo’s thoroughness insisted that they take the precaution of increasing the distance between themselves and their enemies as much as possible, however unnecessary he himself believed it to be. Because the wind of the evening was cooler than any they had yet encountered, Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara allowed them a bigger fire than usual and after eating, they gathered beside it relaxed, leaning on their haversacks and talking quietly over the day between them, urging Nonnie, who was drowsy with healthy fatigue and warmth, to take part in her newly acquired Bushman. Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo at times clapped their hands and laughed loudly with delight over her efforts and in such a way that even her mistakes in pronunciation and at times kindergarten phrases were elevated into great achievements.
Hintza, free from pain and for once unsedated, had managed to stretch himself out flat on his tummy in his favourite conversational attitude between François and Nonnie. At one minute he was shutting his eyes ecstatically over the warmth and comfort that was flowing over him from the fire and the company. The next he would be looking out of his left eye at Nonnie but with the right as firmly shut because he had a great sense of economy of effort on these occasions, and never believed in using two eyes when one was enough. Then suddenly he would be shutting the left eye and looking up out of the right at François before closing both. He did not look at Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo across the flames oppposite, him. It was not necessary. His nose kept him close enough in touch with their being and was wrinkling finely and re-wrinkling delicately with his own select enjoyment of their savour, as if his nose were a vessel of sheer joy, full and overflowing. And he would then lick his lips with satisfaction, as if to say, “Now only a fool of a mongrel could think a dog could be better situated . . .”
This would be followed by a sigh of the deepest philosophic satisfaction. Hearing it, Nonnie could not resist stroking him fondly behind the head, though lightly so that it should not irritate, while saying to François, “You know, it’s most extraordinary. But I do honestly believe Hin is perfectly aware of the fact that Nuin-Tara and I are women and you and Xhabbo just men.”
François was almost insulted that anything so elementary could for the most fleeting of moments have even been thought of as something beyond Hintza’s capacity for discrimination.
Nonnie in her quick way, however, anticipated what the response was about to be and was at once tempted into a provocative vein, “You see, I don’t think it’s just a fantasy on my part, but he treats me and Nuin-Tara quite differently. He shows us, if! may say so without being thought vain, more respect than he shows you and Xhabbo. There’s really something quite courtly, almost knightly, in his attitude to us—an example which I think you and your beloved Xhabbo might well study to your advantage.”
It is uncertain whether François would have realised that Nonnie was deliberately baiting him into a response that would enable her to confuse him all the more, so that she could have the ultimate joy of delivering him from discomforture at its highest. He himself had no time to think of a reply. Nonnie had hardly finished and the light of new mischief barely arrived on her face and in the upward sideways glance she gave him, when the lion roared.
François had heard countless lions roar at Hunter’s Drift and in the deepest bush on his journeys with Mopani, but he had never heard a roar like this. It was not that the lion was unusually near that made the sound unique. It was the quality of the roar and François, who thought that he was rather an expert on the voices of lions, recognised at once that it was the most immediate of all roars he had ever heard. Between the impulse to roar and the roar itself there was no interval at all; impulse and achievement were one as they were one with indifference to its consequences. As a result it came out of the silence like lightning sheer, uncompromising and uninhibited. Even the flames of their own precise camp fire, trembled with the reverberation of the sound and as it finally cut the silence in two, curtsied low to the ground before so royal a sound.
For the first time François experienced the truth of something Mopani had always stressed to him. Even at Hunter’s Drift the lions no longer roared as they roared in Mopani’s youth. It was as if they were becoming dispirited by the propinquity of unnatural men and the threat they were to their surroundings and their security. Almost as if the ruthless destruction of their kind accelerated by the arrival of white and black in Africa had entered their electric apprehensions and dimmed the great fire life had originally lit in them. Neither “Chaliapin” nor “Caruso”, nor even Boris Cristoff, the greatest of a new generation of roarers or any other member of the choir of the hereditary order of heraldic lions appo
inted to his home, equalled the fullness, the purity, the power and the speed of this desert voice. It sounded as the voice of the first lion must have sounded as it walked still warm from the magnetic fingers that had just fashioned it through the first night in the garden at the beginning.
François responded in every nerve, cell and tissue of himself as if to a charge of electricity, and the hair on his head felt as if it were standing on end. Again and again the lion roared, and so gave him just time enough to adjust to his dazzled senses and look at his companions.
A Far Off Place Page 33