Nonnie of course came first, not just because he was concerned that she might have been frightened. She thrilled him by showing no sign of fear. She was sitting with her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her lips apart and her eyes bigger and wider than normal, so it seemed to him, full of wonder and amazement over the lightning and thunder of the sound. Hintza, characteristically, the moment the first lightning flash of sound struck the camp, was at once on his feet, his tail stretched out taut behind him, his nose aligned on the sound, every hair on his back erect and sparkling in the firelight. His lips were drawn back not entirely, as Nonnie thought out of eagerness to protect them from any menace.
But most remarkable of all was the reaction of Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo. The two jumped to their feet, laughing and almost crying with delight. They joined hands and did a gay little dance on their side of the fire, crying, “It is he, oh yes, yes, yes! It is he feeling himself to be utterly a lion again, calling to us in the voice of a lion! It is he, it is he!”
“And who is he?” François could not help demanding. But they were far too involved doing their dance of delight either to hear or bother with questions. But when the lion’s last roar died away they waited breathless, wondering whether such beauty could ever again be restored to the darkness of night. The silence, from which all the other small, multitudinous, delicate and sensitive voices that can only venture to raise their tribute to their own small share of creation under cover of darkness, had vanished. Nonnie found her tongue and exclaimed, “Oh François, do look at Hin! Don’t you think you’d better hold him back because he might go after that lion at any minute. He looks beside himself with rage and typical male aggression.”
She was amazed to hear François say, “Oh, he’s not angry, he’s just full of envy.”
François would have left it at that, but his reply was so unexpected and sounded so strong that Nonnie’s curiosity was at once in full cry for more. He had there and then to describe in minute detail Hintza’s complex about lions. Only when he had done did she take Hintza into her arms, fondling him and saying, “There, beloved Hin, there. I wouldn’t like you any different, not in one hair, tooth, dribble, nail or even snore of yourself. You’re perfect as you are!”
Only then was François free to question Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo, who had resumed their places on the ground by the fire still laughing and exchanging delighted thoughts between them.
For Nonnie, educated in the belief that lions were the most dangerous animals in Africa, François’s attitude, Hintza’s behaviour and now Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo celebrating the lion’s roar as the happiest of events, was so revolutionary a manifestation that she waited impatiently for the explanation François extracted from Xhabbo.
“They know him well,” François was able to tell her, after much too long a time for her liking. “They call him ‘Old Black Lightning’ because he’s not only lightning in voice but also in temperament and behaviour. Black because they say he has a long thick mane of midnight hair, hanging low over a coat of sunlight. And he’s not really a lion at all, they say, but a great magician who likes to hunt in the shape of a lion, and he is very friendly to all Bushmen. They say he raises his voice in this way so that far and wide Bushmen can know precisely where there’s game in plenty for them to hunt and eat. Tomorrow, they say, we’ll see how true the voice is, and find masses of game to give us the food we badly need now, because as you know our supplies are nearly all used up.”
Nonnie could accept all that, except believe that the lion was really a magician. However, she still was not satisfied that she knew enough about François’s reaction, insisting, “But you, François, you have a something of your own about that lion. You should have seen the look on your face! It frightened me far more than the lion, because you looked, I promise you, almost as if you’d just heard the voice of the good God in Heaven Himself.”
François, although he ignored the deliberate exaggeration, took her question seriously and answered it with complete spontaneity, so deeply resolved was his deliberate self after the sound, and the almost unbelievable nostalgia for the unblurred and abundant beginning of life to which the voice of the lion had just testified and from which the dim and blurred present excluded them.
“You see, Nonnie, it’s just that for me the roar of the lion is one of the most beautiful things on earth. It is the most miraculous of sounds and I promise you that the lion we’ve just heard has the greatest and most beautiful voice of any I have ever heard. I don’t know . . .” he paused as his imagination fumbled after a meaning almost too swift and adroit to grasp, and added as if a ware of the innate feebleness of his words, “I don’t know, but it was rather as if Old Black Lightning was speaking for all the lions that have ever been and reminding us of something we’ve lost. But it’s not only I who have this thing about lions. ’Bamuthi would have told you the same; and so would Mopani. Mopani says that the four most beautiful things in life are thunder, lightning, a falling star and the roar of a lion.”
“But poor old Hin,” Nonnie exclaimed, seeing Hintza beside her no longer angry with envy but looking singularly abject and deprived, as if he were profoundly dissatisfied with himself, “Look at him. What can we do to rid him of that horrid complex for good?”
“If I had been at Hunter’s Drift,” François told her, “I would have played him some of his favourite music. It’s the only thing that helps him somehow on these occasions.”
“D’you think it would help if perhaps I sang to him?” Nonnie asked.
“What a marvellous idea!” François exclaimed joyfully.
Almost at once Nonnie began singing to Hintza in a soft, round and surprisingly clear and confident voice. François had never heard her sing before or even knew that she could. He was as entranced as Hintza was, by the natural uncontrived quality of her singing. He realised at once that she was singing in Portuguese and felt disappointed that he could not follow the words as he followed the music. But the effect on Hintza was magical. He sighed his great sigh of contentment; shut his eyes, and only his beautiful pointed ears erect in the firelight showed how carefully he was listening.
The tune that Nonnie sang, beautiful as it was, was perhaps also too charged with its own form of nostalgia for such a moment. It certainly became evident after a while that even Nonnie was being drawn by it into a remembrance of things past that were dangerous for her self-possession. The moment Hintza appeared thoroughly soothed, she stopped singing. Her hand on Hintza’s head, she sat there looking into the fire as if she were seeing and hearing things far beyond it.
She started when François, whose instinct urged an immediate return to their here and now, asked, “What was that you sang? And you do sing beautifully, Nonnie. You must please do it more often for us. Just look how happy you’ve made old Hin!”
“Oh, it was just a fado.”
“A fado? What on earth is that?” he asked, instantly in love with the sound of the word.
“It’s Portuguese for a song of fate.” Her tone was final as the answer was brief.
“But what were the words, Nonnie? Could you translate them for us, please?” François begged.
“If you don’t mind, François,” Nonnie pleaded, obviously hating to refuse so obvious and simple a request for reasons of her own, that she was anxious not to disclose, “I’ll gladly do it some other time. But I’m very tired tonight. I wonder if you’d mind if we went to bed now. Look, Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo are already settling down. I don’t think they thought much of my singing.”
But how wrong Nonnie’s last remark had been was proved first thing the next morning. As they prepared for the journey just before sunrise, and Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara scattered the ashes of their fire and obliterated the marks of their camp so that it was almost impossible to tell that any human being had ever rested there, Xhabbo passed his left hand over the place and pronounced something in the tone of a priest uttering a blessing. In the midst of all the other sounds Nonnie heard her own name, and so promptly ask
ed François what Xhabbo had been saying.
To her amazement he answered, “He is giving a name to our camp and he is calling it, ‘The place where Nonnie sang to the Lion’.”
Nonnie blushed with embarrassed pleasure, and asked quickly, “Do they always give names to the places where they camp?”
François nodded. “Yes, always,” and seeing the “Why?” already forming on her lips, explained, quoting Xhabbo, that they did it “so that the place should know that they were feeling how the place had given itself to them and how they in turn were giving something of themselves to the place, on account of it,” so that, quoting Xhabbo again, “the place can always feel that although they themselves have gone, they have left feeling that something utterly of themselves would always be there feeling itself part of it.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Below the Horizon
THE MARCH THAT followed turned out to be the shortest ever. Soon after sunrise, before the heat could distort the view and deprive an unstained morning of its freshness, they rounded one of those slow curves in the dry river-bed to see Xhabbo halted and Hintza elongated and stretched immediately behind him, trembling with excitement. François, Nonnie and Nuin-Tara joined Xhabbo who, with one finger to his lips and his other hand pointing to show how truly Old Black Lightning had spoken the night before, out of his sense of abundance that was life at the undimmed beginning, but also of abundance in the desert here and now. The wide river-bed, the heavy swell of the dunes at the sides and the whole scene on to another far bend smoking with morning blue, all was aflicker and aflame with the greatest congregation of springbok François had ever seen. The nearest of the elegant smouldering geodetic shapes was barely forty strides away, and they had all stopped grazing and lifted their fine drawn heads to look at the newcomers.
The light was so clear, their pose so near that Nonnie could see their long, dark lashes shading great dark brown eyes, full of the pooled reflection of the morning. And those eyes, far from being alarmed, were looking them up and down out of natural curiosity as if wondering, “What are these shapes and these smells we have not met before?” And after staring at them, innocent and totally unafraid, they gave an almost perceptible shrug of their aristocratic shoulders, indicating that they accepted the enigma of the newcomers as a natural part of the mystery that life was in a desert out of which something new was forever coming, and so impossible for antelope senses to define or to be allowed to interfere with the enjoyment of the lovely pasture spread out before them with its dressing of dew. One by one they lowered their heads and went on breaking their fast so ardently that the sound of munching was loud on the air and made Hintza lick his lips.
But occasionally some of the males would suddenly bound straight up into the air without warning from where they stood, high above the massed assembly. And as they bounded, thousands of heads would be raised to watch how high they could arch in the blue and justify the presumption of interrupting their meal. Some of the performers achieved greater heights than others but there was none among them who was not distinguished and did not circumscribe movements more beautiful than any in the several ballets Nonnie had seen. Most impressive of all, not a male arrived at the summit of his bound without arching his back like a bow strung for an arrow aimed at the sun, and there unfolded the gleaming gold of hair along the curve of his spine and let it fall down along its flanks like Brussels lace, exposing the white underneath flashing in the sun.
In the process of unfolding the lace, he would do a quick double entrechat with his legs so that the black pointed patent-leather hooves glanced like mirrors before he regained the earth with sprung ankles and quick elastic hooves and at once would rebound forward and up again, repeating its performance, so rapidly and so often that the pattern of movement was a ricochet of arches skimming a still water-surface of grass. Each time this happened all the teenagers among the gypsy women, and some of the mothers, grandmothers and even great-grandmothers were so provoked by the bold eurhythmic virtuosity of their men, that admiration resounded from far down in their throats and sent their breath whistling through wide dilated nostrils in a manner Nonnie thought more uplifting than any olé or bravo she had ever heard.
It was extraordinary how much more shy, almost apprehensively feminine, the vast herd of ewes appeared after each such performance, and how demurely mothers and virgin daughters resumed their grazing, with their tails more firmly drawn than ever into their foam-white thighs.
It was all that Nonnie could do not to cry out, “Oh no, no! You can’t! You just can’t possibly do it to them!” when she saw that Xhabbo was making signs at François, that now was his moment to shoot. Unbelieving, she watched François unsling his rifle and kneel down to take aim. She looked at Nuin-Tara for support in the protest clamouring for demonstration. But Nuin-Tara, like Xhabbo, was looking steadily, with an expression that seemed to Nonnie inhumanly detached at François, as if only interested in divining what he was aiming at.
Suddenly she felt deeply and unreasonably resentful of François. There was no room for thought in her feelings. And she had no idea how reluctantly he was accepting this charge of killing which their need to keep alive had put upon him. She could not tell that although he had done shooting of this kind for so many years, he had never become reconciled to it and always felt as if his past experience were not of the slightest use to him, and he was doing his killing for the first time again. Yet as always, he made the only concession possible to his reluctance to shoot by selecting the oldest buck in view. When he had him firmly lined in the sights of his gun, a prayer at heart that his aim would be true and his target feel no pain, he shot it as it stood, an Etruscan image of flame beside an outcrop of salt some two hundred yards away. His shot took it just behind the glowing shoulder, and François was full of relief to see it fall to the ground without a struggle.
Even so, Nonnie remained standing where she was, her eyes blurred with tears of hurt and anger, her whole being crying out, “Oh, how could you, François? How could you of all people? As if we have not all had enough wounding and killing and death already!”
Even the whole fresh feeling of a newly born desert morning, trembling with the uprush of life and light out of the shadow of night, rushed in to aid and abet her darkening spirit of reproach. She stood there irresolute watching, and might have remained there until François and Nuin-Tara had finished skinning and cutting up the buck had it not been for a slight incident.
Nuin-Tara turned about and, amazed to see Nonnie still and inert, without apparent intention of joining in their work, raised her hand to beckon her imperiously forward. At once François, his hands red with blood, caught Nuin-Tara’s arm and said something to her. Nuin-Tara obediently turned about and knelt down to help the two men. Nonnie somehow knew then that François was aware of what she was experiencing and anxious to spare her feelings. That knowledge instantly relieved her of resentment though it did not deprive her of her reluctance to be a witness of what still felt like murder to her, and death to the beauty and innocence of a morning full of faith and hope of life. But divided as she became thereby, she was able to will herself forward and resolve not to be out-done by Nuin-Tara. Happily, by the time she joined them, the buck was no longer recognisable as one but skinned and half cut up. Yet she just could not speak to any of the three of them.
For once she even spurned the attentions of Hintza, who was trying to make her appreciate what a great deed François had just accomplished on their behalf. Finally, one long look in Nuin-Tara’s eyes shamed her into a different self. Nuin-Tara had never regarded her so sternly, and without speaking, just beckoned Nonnie with impatience to join and help them piling the warm pieces of cut-up flesh on to the skin. That done, each of the four took a corner of the skin and so together carried it with its load for half a mile into the shade of a wild fig tree where Xhabbo announced they would camp for the day. If Nonnie thought she would have had any respite there from the distasteful task of handling the raw meat sh
e was soon proved wrong. For immediately François began cutting up the meat into long, slender strips while Xhabbo went running back to the place where the buck had been shot. Soon he returned with a satchel full of yellowish brown grains gathered from a natural outcrop of salt Nonnie was to be told the Bushmen called a salt-lick.
Muttering the Bushman sound aloud to herself, she forced herself to help Nuin-Tara rub rough salt into the strips of meat and then hang them up, slung over the lower branches of the trees, to dry out in their shade. And slowly in the course of working with the others, her sense of the necessities of their situation re-emerged to reconcile her gradually to the killing. The process of reconciliation was made easier when she observed how after the first reaction not of alarm so much as of astonishment at the unusual sound of a gun-shot, the immense congregation of buck without exception calmly resumed their grazing as before. If they could accept and overlook the death of one of the greatest of their number, Nonnie felt she had no right or cause to set herself apart and sit as a prim judge in a court of law of her own, condemning the occasion.
One mentions this incident in some detail not only because of its unique impact on Nonnie but also because it has to serve as an example of a great long series of other similar occasions when Xhabbo and François had to kill all sorts and conditions of animals and birds for their food. Moreover, with this introduction behind her, Nonnie managed with Nuin-Tara first as a stern and then encouraging teacher beside her, fully to adapt herself to a new role and become an ungrudging and fully committed working partner of their dedicated little company.
A sign that this had not passed unobserved came that very evening. They were resting in the camp, waiting for their new supply of food to dry out, so as to become emergency rations for the next stage of their journey. At sundown Xhabbo came to her and presented her with a digging stick of ironwood which he had been making in secret all afternoon. When François announced that it was the Bushman equivalent of a diploma that she had graduated from the university of Bushman womanhood, Nonnie’s eyes shone with tears of release. From then on she carried the stick with her always, with a pride no soldier risen from the ranks carrying a Field-Marshal’s baton could have equalled. This camp, the next day, was blessed accordingly with the name, “The Place of Nonnie’s Digging Stick.”
A Far Off Place Page 34