A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo now took a direct hand. They had just come to an area of the desert where they found great nests of ivory ostrich eggs. Almost daily they were eating vast ostrich egg omelettes at dawn before starting on their march and Nuin-Tara would select the finest of the egg-shells. In the evening, while they sat talking and sewing round their fire she would fashion hundreds of round beads out of the shells, until she could line the hems of Nonnie’s skirt and the dividing line from waist to hem with the beads of the softest cream. What is more, she made a broad band of the beads of the same shells, like the one she wore round her head, for Nonnie to wear, and it glowed in the firelight like a tiara of pearls, against her fine and abundant hair, always shining as with a reflection of her own vivid allotment of life.

  It was a gift more decorative than practical because Nonnie still had her specially designed bush-hat with her, bleached into a faded khaki without by the sun but its lining of pillar-box red silk was still surprisingly bright. However, Nuin-Tara from the start had been fascinated by the abundance and quality of Nonnie’s hair and seemed almost overwhelmed with impatience towards the end of the day for the moment when Nonnie, arriving at camp, would remove her hat, throw it casually aside and let her beautiful hair fall down to her waist. At times Nuin-Tara would come over to her, take a thick shining strand between her fingers and stroke it with a deep unbelieving wonder. She would watch Nonnie use her own hands as best she could as a substitute comb and when they had water enough, soak her handkerchief in it, and sponge the dust and sweat from it, until it looked like a darker weave of the camp fire itself.

  Once indeed Nuin-Tara had moved Nonnie almost to tears by saying, as she fondled a strand of hair between her fingers, “We who feel that the clouds in the sky are feeling themselves to be the hair of the people who have gone before us, gathered by the wind that breathes also in our bodies, know thus all the more now for seeing hair like yours, that clouds and hair feel themselves to be forming and forming always together from one into the other by the same wind on account of it.”

  For the first time, head-dress in place, she could not resist putting her arms round Nuin-Tara and kissing her on the cheek, resolving to wear the new head-dress every night, the moment they arrived in camp.

  Also, from then on, Nonnie’s carefully chosen suit which had served her well was neatly folded and stored safely in the bottom of her rucksack; the fear that it would not last out on the journey laid to rest for good. She wore only the dress that François, Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara between them had fashioned for her, until weeks later, it was augmented and, in her imagination, made perfect by a bolero tailored out of the even finer steenbuck skin. The day she discarded her European suit for this dress, Bushman in inspiration and European in design and execution, it was as if she had stepped out of an outworn shell of herself and become a new person.

  How new a person was revealed at the end of the first day of walking in procession under the witch-blue glass of the sky of the desert, like one of those figures to be seen in a Poussin painting of some myth and legend of her pagan European beginnings.

  It all happened at perhaps the most beautiful of their camps yet. Xhabbo chose a site just underneath the rim of one of the highest of the dunes where they would be sheltered against the wind of the night which, however slight, was becoming increasingly cool and also because deep within the dune itself was a vast reservoir of water which, whenever the rare rains fell, sank instantly into the deep sand and was preserved there from evaporation by a sub-tropical sun. As a result it was covered with melons and cucumbers. The melons particularly were vital because for many weeks now they had had to take the place of water in their lives; sipwells were far behind and even farther in front of them.

  Every evening it had become a routine duty before they ate for Nuin-Tara and Nonnie to slice up the melons, pile them high in their dixies and slowly reduce them to a pulp which could be squeezed out to fill their flasks with liquid for their march. By night they ate the melons themselves and both liquid and melon tasted oddly sharp, almost too bitter, and not at all to Nonnie’s or even Hintza’s liking at the beginning. However, after weeks of experience they came to love the juice and found it even more satisfying than water. Nonnie was continually amazed at how that bitter taste had an afterlash of sweetness hidden in it, which not only drove the thirst of the day utterly out of her throat and blood but soothed her spirit.

  There then, high as they were, on a dune that was higher than the one which had given them their first glimpse of the desert, the view stretched so wide and far that it made them silent and particularly solemn. It was almost as if taking in the view was a whole-time occupation, demanding all their senses and powers of definition to contain it. Moreover the day, dying peacefully, was summoning all that there was of colour and delicacy of tone in nature to accompany its going, and render the end as gentle and loving as possible. The night itself, coming up in the wake of a bright blue half-moon, seemed unusually compassionate and maternal. François thought at first that it was the natural drama, inherent always for him in the great transitions of the universe, that was making Nonnie as silent as himself. He gave no special thought to her behaviour, all the less so because of an interruption from the darkening world around them. Just as the night snuffed out the last sacramental candle of light on the horizon, there came from far away the voice of the lion which had accompanied them nightly on their long march. François had come to know and love it well and did not doubt the premonition that it was a voice of farewell and that already it was speaking from below the horizon away to the south.

  If he had doubted it, his doubts would have been stilled by the reaction of Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo. The roar had hardly reached them when both jumped to their feet. They turned their backs to the fire, raised and held their hands out before them in the ancient Bushman gesture of farewell and stood there until the lion had spoken three times. Then the voice vanished for good. Only then did they lower their hands and turn about, sit down, sad and forlorn, until Xhabbo spoke up in what François imagined must have been the tone of an Old Testament prophet who had seen the last of the privileged manifestations of his god.

  “Oh Foot of the Day,” Xhabbo explained, “Foot of the Day . . . he is gone and in his going was telling us that he has brought us far enough and that we are now on our own, left only with our tapping and the tapping of the stars and the wind to help us on our way.”

  “But why, Xhabbo? Why has he gone now so suddenly?” François asked.

  “Look, Foot of the Day,” he answered sombrely, “Look at the way he has gone and feeling yourself looking utterly, you will feel the answer.”

  François looked. From below the horizon, he saw one after the other, great flashes of fire of lightning, fed by invisible thunder-clouds, flame and flare and flicker in the dark. It was the first lightning he had seen for months, and a sign that somewhere the universe was still in business, renewing the earth and reprieving even sand so parched and apparently condemned to death as desert sand. Utterly absorbed, he hardly heard Xhabbo explain that even so great a magician as Old Black Lightning, like all the animals and birds of which he was chief, would have to say, when such a call came, “Yes, oh Lightning, look! I come!”

  “But why goodbye, Xhabbo? Why do we not follow him then?”

  “Oh, have you not heard then Foot of the Day, that he was not asking us to come with him, but feeling himself parting from us, saying farewell, knowing we have to stay and go on our own way. And this is the way Xhabbo’s tapping said from the beginning we must go. But if the animals do not hasten to show that they are obedient to the lightning and have hearts utterly ready to listen to what the thunder has to say and be there to rejoice in what the rain brings, showing how they care for the rain and the thunder and the lightning, they will all three go utterly away and never return again. Even now, all Xhabbo’s people seeing the lightning wherever they are in the desert will hasten towards it too on account of their feeling utterly thus. Yet
the way of the lion now, towards the lightning, is the way of death for you and Nonnie, because it is where your enemies are.”

  And Xhabbo went on to explain how they were approaching the great swamps and rivers in the western desert, how there was only the narrowest of desert strips along the edges of the swamps to give them a chance of getting through a broad ring of African tribes, all sympathetic or actively involved in the cause of their enemies. Only by following their present course would they have any real hope of reaching the great water where the people constantly coming up out of the sea could take care of them.

  With that their dinner was ready. As always in people immediate with instinct as Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara were, they tried to relieve François, Nonnie and themselves from the pain of that final sense of separation that the voice of the lion had inflicted on them, by distracting themselves afterwards with some of their many fireside games. The first games were almost too esoteric even for François’s comprehension but suddenly he realised they were being treated to one of the greatest of Bushman games: a riddle presented through movements of the body.

  Xhabbo had suddenly gone down on his hands and knees and circled the fire in tiny movements, unbelievably quick and precise. At the end of the circle, he would make his arm give way under him and hit the sand with his shoulder, look behind him, examine his body with a look of stupefaction and then resume his crawling rapidly round again on all fours. At the end of the circle he would collapse as before and so on and on, until he had done it a score of times and the sweat was running down his body. Then stopping in front of Nuin-Tara, he looked at her as if to say, “Now have you got it yet?”

  Nuin-Tara, exasperated, shook her head and François was convinced that if one so experienced as she did not know the answer, he had little chance himself. When Nonnie asked him for an explanation, and even Hintza roused himself from his bed of comfort by the fire, to stand on all fours looking at Xhabbo scornfully as if he had gone off his head, all he could say was, “He’s acting out a riddle. If we don’t get the answer by the third time of asking—they never ask more than three times, it’s an article of faith with them—he will humiliate us all by telling us triumphantly and count himself the winner. Just look at Nuin-Tara, how infuriated she is with herself that Xhabbo can go one better than her in so old and familiar a game.”

  They watched Xhabbo until he was near the end of his third repeat and hence triumphant finale when François breathed heavily into Nonnie’s ear, “Good Heavens, I think I’ve got it.”

  “Oh do tell me,” Nonnie begged.

  “That wouldn’t be fair.” he answered. “But it’s incredible, he’s become the thing itself.”

  He had hardly finished when Xhabbo halted for the last time in front of Nuin-Tara, looked at her long and steadily as if he pitied her for being such an idiot and waited for her to ask for illumination. Still sullen as the game demanded in order to enhance Xhabbo’s ultimate triumph, she refused to speak and he was free to deliver the killing answer of his own accord.

  A long crackle of electricity sparked on his lips as he uttered a phrase which Nonnie had never heard and of which the explanation had to be delayed, because at once both Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara were flat in the sand wriggling with merriment, laughing and re-laughing their laughter with such a glittering, happy, helpless intensity that even Hintza was affected. Suddenly, without warning, he started running all out round the fire, in wide circles, maddeningly trying to catch hold of his own tail. Hintza’s performance, the laughter and the fact that François began laughing as Nonnie, not even in the happiest of their days in the past had heard in one who specialised after all in laughing inwardly, and the whole frenzied drunken eruption of merriment affected her so that, although she herself did not know the answer, she joined in, almost as hysterical and helpless as Xhabbo.

  “Surely you know now what it was,” François exclaimed when at last they came gasping out of their laughter. But Nonnie still shook her head, and, in despair at her dumbness, intercepted Hintza, who was still chasing his own tail, as if the meaning of it all depended on his grasping it, and gathered him to her saying, “Enough, Hin, enough. I’m certain it’s not worth your or my effort!”

  François looked at her and quietly said, suppressing another eruption of laughter with difficulty, “The answer is a centipede with a sprained ankle.”

  Nonnie let out a loud yelp of laughter and set a delighted Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara laughing all over again, which made François far happier than the immediate cause justified.

  When at last she had finished her laughing she suddenly sat up and with her face unusually solemn, took François’s hand in hers.

  In one of her swift, bewildering changes of mood her eyes filled with tears, and she exclaimed, “Oh, Coiske, do you know, until this moment I thought we could never laugh like that again. I feel almost guilty that we could, with Fa and your Lammie, ’Bamuthi, Amelia and Ousie-Johanna and all those dear people and many more than we know of killed. Is it right that we can laugh so happily and soon after they’ve gone?”

  It was the first time that Nonnie had spoken of the killing at Hunter’s Drift direct to François, and he realised that he had been an accomplice to the suppression of the subject. He had not been ready to talk about it either, even to himself. He confessed himself accordingly to Nonnie and was about to say more when Xhabbo joined them, took their hands in each of his and remarked, “Foot of the Day, Nonnie. Nuin-Tara and I know that the sadness in you is no longer without a name and has found its voice. When sorrow finds a name and a voice, it is like the lightning you see calling and the thunder speaking after it to say that soon the rain will fall on you again.”

  Xhabbo’s words filled Nonnie’s eyes with tears. As a result, she and François talked far into the night that followed, because this great suppressed area of hurt within them was suddenly something out and about in the open, acknowledged and honoured both in thought and speech. It was almost as if the hurt parts of themselves had become personified as two close bereaved friends, brought back into a present where they could be comforted and promised that they would have articulate company to speak for them always, no matter how far they travelled from the place where they had been bereaved and nearly extinguished. At the end of their talk, they fell into a kind of sleep so deep and still and apparently dreamless that for the first time on the march not just Nonnie but François had to be roughly woken by Xhabbo and told that no one called “Foot of the Day” could be so late in welcoming his great begetter, striding up so fast in front of a red explosive dawn.

  From then on for the first time too Nonnie and François found themselves talking openly about the future, thereby confirming a law of whose existence Xhabbo’s remark the night before had been as implicit as midnight is with noon of day. It is simply that until one acknowledges one’s whole past, however painful and humiliating the process might be, and dignifies it with an honest, frank and full admission of its nature into one’s daylight self, one is not free for a future of one’s own.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Singing Tree

  FOR THE FIRST time now François was not afraid that he might frighten Nonnie with the facts of what lay ahead. He could tell her frankly of the hazards, the necessity and danger of breaking through a ring of enemies all over again, and then having once more to work their way for months through a desert, increasingly inhospitable, towards the sea and safety.

  Far from being alarmed, Nonnie asked in her most matter-of-fact and companionable voice, as if all that was irrelevant now, “But François, have you any idea how long it is since we started out? I promise you I haven’t the faintest.”

  François took out his dispatch book, looked at two closely marked pages in it before giving the amazed Nonnie not only the number of days but the month, date and year.

  “We’ve been on the march for exactly one hundred and ninety-seven days,” he announced evenly. Then he paused, looking up to the sky and measuring the angle of the sun, thinki
ng that this was a chance to give her a taste of her own teasing, and added, “And seven hours, six minutes and forty-three and a half seconds.”

  One need not dwell on Nonnie’s reaction, and the banter that followed this open acknowledgment of the time it had taken to come so far. It was the time and distance travelled which made it impossible to record all the names conferred daily by Xhabbo on the camps they had made in the desert. A list of these names would have read partly like a roll of honour of all the beautiful and bright birds and animals of promise that had given their lives so that the five of them could live, and the rest like a catalogue of all the food available in this self-service department store of nature, which was the great desert.

  Some names, however, outside this norm, deserve mention in their own right, like the camp from which they were about to move. It had just been baptised, “The Place where Laughter came back”. Also there was, for instance, the camp far back that was named, “The Place where Nuin-Tara sat on a Thorn”. This was no laughing matter to Nuin-Tara although it was to the others, particularly Xhabbo, who was inclined to think that if he suffered at all, it was from the fact that Nuin-Tara was too house—or should one say camp-proud. He was therefore, not undelighted to discover this slight flaw in her domestic perfections, because it was elementary that thorns had a high priority and were scrupulously looked for and ruthlessly ejected by women from the places where they slept with their men.

  There were names that spoke both for themselves and of their slow, harsh progress and long, long days; names that made François tell Nonnie how both ’Bamuthi and Mopani had always declared that no matter how bare and awful the place where human beings camped, they always left something of themselves behind. These became a cord of gold in the labyrinth of their memories which neither moth nor rust of time and space could ever corrupt. There was “The Place the Mamba paid a visit”, where François was nearly bitten by the most poisonous snake in Africa. There was “The Place the Stars fell over”, where shooting stars plunged and burned out in the dark at such a rate and in such profusion that their eyes were blinded by the flare and the night was like a great display of fireworks. They were all overawed by the strange beauty and solemnity of the spectacle, all the more so when Xhabbo, orchestrating the pronouncement first made on the evening after the massacre, said, “The stars go falling in this manner only when falling, they feel themselves travelling in order to inform all others at distant places that many men and women and children, who have been walking on their heels upright, have utterly fallen over, and that the killing by the men of blackness we have left behind us is now greater than ever.”