Xhabbo said all this confidently but for the first time François had a doubt of his own, not of Xhabbo’s accuracy so much as a doubt caused by something that had to be outside Xhabbo’s experience. From all he had seen of the enemy, he had been impressed by its organisation and attention to detail. He could not imagine that an enemy so efficient and contemporary, would have left mosquito nets out of its reckoning. So that there would be no reason why it should avoid that low-lying mosquito land at night when the shortest and best route demanded they should take it. He realised how for months now he had been more than content to leave everything to Xhabbo. Had it not been for Xhabbo, his imagination would not have been free to help himself and Nonnie to deal with the inner consequences of the disaster which had overtaken them. His debt to Xhabbo seemed immeasurable, and this sense of obligation transformed his doubting into a positive resolution, that in returning to an area of life outside Xhabbo’s experience, he would take a greater share of responsibility.
This and the evidence of a world thickly populated with allies of their enemies as well as their enemies themselves, made him more thoughtful than usual on the way back to the camp. His news made Nonnie thoughtful too and at times so despondent that she became angry with herself. Her anger found tongue in the afternoon, when François told her that the moment had come when she must change her desert dress and sandals for the clothes in her haversack. She looked as if she were about to refuse and François hastened to explain how the rough country ahead and, particularly, the mosquitoes by night, flies and other insects by day made it necessary that she should have as much of her body covered, adding, “You’ve no idea yet how clean and healthy a place the desert is, no flies, no mosquitoes—”
“And, above all, no people,” Nonnie interrupted, “and how like people, that where you have them, you also have pests and sudden death. Oh, how I hate them!”
Nonetheless she went obediently to change and returned to stand in front of François. Her suit, compared to his bleached, much mended and frayed clothes, looked surprisingly fresh. Her face was vivid with self-indignation as she exclaimed, “It’s fantastic, François, I feel just as I used to after a long summer holiday, having to go back to school. I really ought to grow up and be my age by now.”
Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo refused as always to look beyond what was immediately at hand, and like all instinctive people, put their trust in instinctive reaction to the unknown ahead, however disconcerting and perilous it might look, rather than meeting it with some preconceived plan. They napped on and off through the long afternoon. François and Nonnie, with Hintza beside them, rested with their arms on their haversacks, talking until just before sunset, “when they all had their evening meal. The moment it was totally dark, they scattered sand over their last desert fire and set off at a fast, steady pace towards the swamp.
The night was even danker than the previous one but as yet without mist, and the starlight clear enough for Xhabbo to carry on without faltering for some two hours before he suddenly stopped. The reason was plain to all. They could hear the barking of dogs from a dozen or more points in the night ahead and once or twice, in between the barking, human voices, presumably calling out to the dogs, with the only result that the dogs barked back louder.
Hintza, dog of action and, when out of action, of profound contemplation, did not think much of such exhibitionist barking, and he clearly dismissed it as being of the ill-bred mongrel kind. Like his master, he was more interested in the fact that the barking indicated the presence of human beings. So he sniffed the air carefully ahead for a sign of what sort of men they might be, before he turned about and put up a paw against François’s side, to scratch a warning. Then he went up to Nonnie, rubbed his head affectionately against her knee and was rubbed behind his ears for his own comfort as well, before he took up his position again, more alert than he had been for days.
Xhabbo stood there until he had the measure of the barking to his satisfaction, and looked up at the stars before he whispered to them to follow as quietly as they could. He led off at a steady pace, though not as fast as before. The barking drew rapidly nearer and the first voices seemed to be joined by others. Soon all round them they heard the bright, sustained, animated and inspired conversation that delights Bantu Africa in the early hours of the night.
Presently they drew level with the first line of barking dogs and passed between them and the first clusters of bright conversation, until they were surrounded by the noise. Xhabbo paused just to whisper to François that they would have to run now because the rising night air would carry their scent to the dogs. They had not gone far at the run when behind them the volume of barking became so great and sustained that François had no doubt the dogs had their scent. Indeed, the unfamiliar scents in their noses of Europeans and Bushmen and a strange dog, seemed to drive them so frantic that their masters, talking in their kraals, could no longer ignore them.
The din became even greater when only a hundred or so yards away one chief came out of his hut to reprimand his own dogs. He managed to silence them but apparently, noticing how far and wide the barking had spread and that it was still going on unabaited all round him, he started calling to his neighbours for enlightenment.
Soon, neighbours were calling to one another everywhere with an intensity which convinced François that they suspected something foreign, if not menacing, had entered their remote world. Suddenly the dogs in front started barking as well, but luckily, it seemed, just in sympathy with the rest of their kind, not because of any strange scent. Yet this state of alarm proclaimed such a great community of dogs and men that he wondered whether they would ever break through.
Xhabbo, however, seemed undeterred by any misgivings; he knew that the only thing was to go on as fast as they could. He did not look back once to see if they were being followed, not even when, close on their right, there appeared on the dark a sudden glow of firelight, as if some alerted husbandman more cautious than the rest had lit the fire always kept ready by his kraal for the protection of his cattle. But before the flames could rise high enough to light up the earth where they were running, they were hidden in a new area of darkness ahead. More fortunate still, the noise of the dogs and men was now so loud that there was no danger of them being heard as they rushed forward faster than ever over the ground.
Soon, although to Nonnie it had seemed hours, the noise behind them began to recede and Xhabbo was able to fall back into a fast walking pace. Even after all the noise had completely died away, he did not pause. François knew why, and thought it would help the new Nonnie to know as well. He explained that they had to get as far away as they could from this settlement because by the light of day their spoor would be plain enough for all to read.
To his amazement however, Nonnie, who was as little out of breath as he or Xhabbo was, remarked bravely, “For once, François, it may interest you to know that I had already worked that one out for myself.”
Reassured, François said no more and concentrated on the special form of vigil which his doubt of that morning demanded from him.
An hour or so before midnight, Xhabbo stopped for the first time. The bush of trees and thorn and its clearings of grass through which they had been travelling had come to an abrupt end. The smell of impounded water was on their noses and before them a vast stretch of papyrus and in between the papyrus, the glitter of stars deep in water. Beyond the glitter, like a great castle of shadow, was the outline of an immense grove of trees. Between them and the trees the stillness was broken every now and then by the snorting of hippopotamuses, the nostalgic piping of water-birds and an ecstatic chorus of frogs, which seemed to provoke the hyenas on the desert edge into hysterical laughter, and draw from the jackals, somewhere in the direction of the Southern Cross, a sharp, cynical reply. Close as he was to Xhabbo, François felt at once that he was deeply perturbed, and that his reason for stopping was not because the bush had ended and that their dim track was now leading out into a new world of water-grasse
s, bulrushes, papyrus and stagnant water channels.
“Can you not feel yourself hearing it?” he asked. François listened but heard nothing, except those African collaterals of the “musical frogs of the marshes and bogs” which according to poets serenaded the entrance to the underworld of the Greeks.
He might have thought that Xhabbo, perhaps out of sheer fatigue, was re-crossing the frontier of a dream that had plagued him hard and perhaps too long, had it not been for Hintza. Hintza appeared to be listening to what Xhabbo had heard. For once he was not smelling the dark unknown ahead but had his musical ears cocked at the castle of shadow in front. Suddenly he turned abruptly away, and looked up straight at Nonnie. He let out the faintest of whimpers as if pleading that she now ought to come forward and explain it all.
“I’m afraid I do not hear it yet, Xhabbo,” François replied. “But look at Hin, he hears it and is as curious as you.”
Xhabbo looked immensely relieved, as if he had been on the verge of doubting himself, and was encouraged into leading forward again, only much more slowly, picking his way with great care. The fortress of shadow imposed on the night by the trees loomed high in front of them, spangled like Christmas pines with stars. He stopped again and at once not only François but Nonnie heard the sound as well. She grasped François’s arm. Her grip tightened until it hurt.
“Dear Mother in Heaven,” she exclaimed, inexplicably near to tears. “Dear God, what is it? Can’t you hear it too? Tell me quick, can you hear it too?”
“I can hear what sounds like singing,” François replied, more perplexed than upset, “but I don’t know what kind of singing, or why.”
“But François, you idiot,” Nonnie exclaimed. “Can’t you hear, it’s my fado! It’s the song I sang to you that night of the lion. I haven’t heard it since I was in Lisbon with Mummy. Everyone was singing it in Lisbon then. But here, dear God, how can it be possible? Oh Coiske, what does it mean?”
“I can’t tell you what it means literally,” François answered portentously, as his perplexity was invaded by a sense of the ominous. “All I know is what it is believed to be. It’s the great ‘tree of life’ of the Makoba and it is singing, as they put it, ‘in the voice of a woman of the people who come out of the sea’. This singing is foretold in an ancient prophecy, which says it is a sure sign that the time has come when all the black races of Africa must unite and drive the people who came out of the sea, back into the sea. I’m afraid that between that singing and our enemies, there’s some vital connection.”
The grasp on François’s arm tightened even more and he thought that in that small, dark space between them, satin with starlight, he could just see her eyes widen. But he could not know that at that moment, she felt almost as great a despair as anything on the journey had yet made her feel. She found a voice crying out within her that if something so innocent as this little song could be appropriated by their enemies, there were no bounds to either their power or their evil. This, added to the evocation first of a mother who had died in a massacre and followed by that of the father in another, dominated the more subtle, sensitive, nostalgic associations she had with the song. All at once, she felt herself, as indeed all of them, powerless to overcome an evil, so ubiquitous and great.
She let go of François’s arm. She had no intention of making a scene; she was determined not to be weak and expose her despair. Yet at last she was forced to sit down on the ground, put her head between her arms and begin crying quietly to herself. But she had hardly sat down when Hintza was at her side and pushed his head under her arm and chin, trying to lift her face and lick away her tears.
This concern from an animal, in so many ways more helpless than herself, somehow checked her despair, and once checked, she realised that there was something more even than concern for her in Hintza’s behaviour, because having licked her tears and made certain she had stopped crying, Hintza started to nudge her in the most suggestive way. After each nudge he turned his head sideways and with his ears cocked, pointed his nose in the direction of the singing as if to say, in his best scout manner, “Now do your stuff Nonnie. There’s something there that only you know, and you must help us now.”
So clear was the message, or so clear was the intuition Hintza brought alive in the intuitive person she had always been, that she found herself listening again to the singing, but more objectively. This time she could no longer doubt. There was a woman singing with the faultless diction of an aristocratic Portuguese voice. She jumped to her feet and rejoined François, who, more and more anxious at what was happening below him, was about to come to her.
“François,” she begged, “please can we go on and get a bit nearer? I’m sure that’s a Portuguese woman singing over there.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Great Thirstland
MEANWHILE, THE SINGING had had its own impact on Xhabbo. Certain that everyone in their little company had now heard it as he had first heard it in his dream, he became the full, confident self he had not been since his dream. Not only was he himself proved right but the validity of the dreaming process within him was reaffirmed. This process had brought him and his people out of the dark, unrecorded past, through centuries of persecution and, though still cruelly persecuted in the present, it gave life no matter how awful and grim a meaning that they always accepted gratefully as some undeserved gift worth far more than the price living demanded. A clear appreciation of what the situation required flared in him again and, of his own unprompted accord, he softly told the others to follow him. Their only way now was past that place of singing with the trees looming so high and dark about it. They would have to hasten by it, because he wanted them deep into the swamp and under cover by daylight. He led forward, doubled over and keeping in the shadows of the bush and at the base of the tall papyrus, flared and crackling with the impact of the starlight over the track.
A bare hundred yards on, the track widened. The singing was clear and near and just beyond it was the after-glow of many fires thrown up from the far side of the fortress. Xhabbo halted at once. Never in all the experience of Bushmen, who in their constant coming and going between the eastern and western halves of their vast wasteland had constantly rounded this strategic cape of swamp, jutting into their ocean of a land, had the fires of men been seen at that place.
He waited until François joined him and was about to point all out to him but it was not necessary, because François was already commenting, “I was afraid of this, Xhabbo. I was afraid the enemy would have medicines against mosquitoes. When I saw those trucks coming this way in the morning, I expected to find something like this. But do you feel we can get by the fires without being seen?”
Xhabbo muttered out of a self newly restored again by the proof that the dream vision had been true, that never yet there had been a fire of man which a Bushman had not somehow managed to get by in the dark. All they had to do was to follow him.
And follow him they would have done, if it had not been for an unexpected complication. This came from Nonnie. She had stood silently by, while Xhabbo and François had been discussing their situation, listening to the singing. She knew without doubt that only a Portuguese woman could be singing that song as it was being sung. She could tell from the tone that it was too tragic even for so nostalgic a song of fate, and believed the unknown woman was in terrible trouble, singing against her will. A feeling of utter helplessness communicated itself to Nonnie out of the manner of her singing, as she heard the flow of words that can be translated only roughly as:
“This song of fate was born on a day
When the wind hardly stirred
And the sky prolonged the sea
At the home of a boat of sail
And in the heart of a sailor
Who being sad, sang:
Oh how great the beauty
Of my earth, my hill, my valley
Of leaves, flowers and yellow fruit!
Look, if you see lands of Spain,
Sand
s of Portugal,
Look, blind with tears!
In the mouth of a sailor
On a fragile boat of sail,
The hurt song dying . . .”
Here the singing stopped, and Nonnie thought she heard the singer crying, but soon the unknown woman took up the song again,
“Pray that although another day,
When the wind shall hardly stir
And the sky prolong the sea
At the prow of another boat of sail
Shall sail another sailor,
Who being sad, will sing:
Oh how great the beauty . . .”
Nonnie did not wait for the chorus to be repeated for she knew at last what she had to do. She went up to François and Xhabbo to announce, with a vehemence that surprised them, “I don’t know what the two of you are planning, but I want you please, please not to go on until we’ve spoken to that woman singing. I know she’s Portuguese and, from the way she’s singing, she’s in trouble. I’ll never forgive myself, or you, if we go by without trying to help her.”
François had never seen Nonnie quite so sure of herself. He would have liked, after his highly trained nature, to give the matter deliberate thought but he was not allowed to, because to his amazement Xhabbo declared that he was feeling utterly that Nonnie was right. Had not he, Xhabbo, been asked in his dream to cut that woman from the ox-hide thongs that bound her to the tree? He too must be obedient to his dream if the dream dreaming him was not to abandon him and the evil ever to end, and they to go safe to the sea.
He did not wait for the approval of the others. He just went down into his favourite stalking position on hands and knees, and began crawling forward as rapidly as he had done that happy evening, when he had pretended to be a centipede with a sprained ankle, and laughter had returned to them. Ah, where was that evening now?
A Far Off Place Page 39