François absorbed Xhabbo’s information meticulously and listened without word until this final summing-up, before breaking in, “We’ve got to do it in four moons,” he declared fiercely. “We’ve got to do it at the most in five, and the very utterly most, six moons, Xhabbo. We’ve got to do it. From today you must please not spare any of us but lead on as if feeling the enemy is coming fast on our heels.”
Nonnie, thinking, “you protest too much, François,” was convinced that there was more in all this than François wanted to meet their eyes, particularly hers.
“And why suddenly in such a hurry?” she asked aloud. “Are you not happy in your work any more?”
“I think you’ve been here longer than is good for you, Nonnie,” he tried to reply, as if there were no truth in her jesting, “And the sooner you get back to your finishing school the better.”
Nonnie was not deceived, but out of the wisdom of the new “Nuin-Tara” self she had so painfully laboured to acquire, she held her peace, hoping from day to day that François would say more to her of his own account. Yet he did not, to her increasing dismay. His knowledge seemed to him too dreadful to disclose before it could serve any useful purpose. And this knowledge which he kept so closely to himself was simply that if someone was bitten by a tsetse fly and infected with sleeping sickness, and was not given proper treatment within six months, he would be beyond any cure that would not leave terrible after-effects. If it went untreated for more than six months, the disease would progressively establish itself in the central nervous system and within a year the person would be beyond any cure at all. He could rule out death from the disease, but he could not bear the thought that any of his companions, whether Nonnie, Hintza or Nuin-Tara, if cured, should be cured so late that their bright, physical selves would be dulled or maimed in any way. In his fear, one of Mopani’s sayings became a kind of motto to him on the march that followed: “Preparing for the worst is the only way of giving the best a chance to happen.”
In a manner that perturbed them all, he was suddenly a strangely clouded companion from then on, particularly when they had just come through another tsetse fly attack, as for some weeks almost daily they had to. It was no good him saying, when they emerged at last into the western desert, that it was all great fun, and that he was laughing inwardly all the time as never before. No one was deceived, Hintza least of all. He showed his anxiety by hardly ever taking his eyes off François. Whenever they were at rest or asleep, Hintza pressed against him harder than ever, as if to say, “Look, I am here, and when I am here, how can anything possibly ever go wrong?”
Every day François was the first to wake, urging them to hurry over their eating, urging them out of the camp, and then wanting them to march longer than ever during the day. Even so, at the end of even the longest marches, he would complain that they could have gone on further. This tendency in François became all the more pronounced when, twenty-seven days after the first tsetse fly attack, Nonnie was unusually difficult to wake up.
When she was thoroughly awake at last, she remarked to François, “I’m mad with myself. I’ve suddenly begun to wake up with the most awful headaches, and it’s not because you or Hin has kept snoring. If I may say so, you’ve been unusually quiet sleepers of late. Haven’t you, darling Hin?”
She uttered her complaint lightly but François had already noticed that she had not been eating so much as usual. He had noticed too that Xhabbo had gone off his food and on several occasions was reprimanded by Nuin-Tara for not eating as a man ought to eat. So when Nonnie finished speaking, François looked across their fire and saw Xhabbo rubbing the temples of his head with both hands. François asked if it was true then that his head was troubling him, and that he had not been eating as well as usual. Xhabbo smiled dutifully and admitted that for a fortnight or so now “I, Xhabbo, have not been I,” but he was sure it would pass. And he smiled all the more when François went to his medicine store and gave both Nonnie and Xhabbo a pill for their headaches.
François, never inclined to jump to conclusions, was more reluctant than ever to do so now, because the only conclusion could be sleeping sickness. The only optimistic factor in their situation was that however closely he observed Nuin-Tara, Hintza or himself, none showed signs either of headaches or loss of appetite. Indeed, Hintza was eating enough for four. But he watched Nonnie and Xhabbo even more carefully, and within days he was certain that their headaches were worse, the loss of appetite greater. He was sure they were both showing the early signs of sleeping sickness.
There and then he determined that while Nonnie and Xhabbo still had some of their former strength, and still could eat sufficient to keep up this strength, they would march even faster and that, in order to reach the sea under six months he would take short cuts which he knew were a calculated risk and which before they would not have contemplated.
François never went back on this last decision. After due consultation with Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara he cut out what Xhabbo had estimated as nearly the month’s hard marching which absolute safety demanded, and risked going through the middle of a long, straggling line of African settlements stretched between a series of permanent water-holes. They went between one water-hole after the other, very much as they had gone through the far more densely populated area at the entrance to the swamps: dogs barking at them at night; men shouting to one another and lighting great fires, but never alarmed enough to come after them. Yet his plan to march Nonnie and Xhabbo to the limits of their strength was another matter, for it seemed to him that from the time he began taxing their infected bodies in a way hard for even his un-infected body to take, the illness accelerated. He remembered just in time the Matabele saying that the longest way round a hill was often the shortest way to the summit. He recalled how he had been taught that man, thrown on his own resources in the world of nature, could survive only by strict observance of the law of proportion.
It came to him all the more vividly at the end of the last of his desperate marches. They were assembled round the camp fire. Nonnie refused to look at him and appeared close to tears. François had no inkling that, feeling increasingly ill and exhausted, and knowing that Xhabbo was hardly any better, she was perceiving first with unbelief then utter incomprehension how François, knowing it all too, could drive them as hard as he was. She ended up not only by feeling more ill, but that night for the first time she was full of resentment against him for what she thought was such obvious and senseless lack of understanding and common humanity. She tried in vain to convince herself that he must have a reason. But if so, why did he keep it secret, and a secret, above all, from her? In that past at Hunter’s Drift and Silverton Hill on which they had promised never to look back, where she had been the first to become aware of a secret self that François had endured alone far too long, had they not pledged themselves not to have any secrets from each other again?
So when François asked her in a voice full of concern what the matter was, she looked at him with eyes as bright with resentment as they were with the first touch of the fever of her sickness, “You, only you, François,” she blurted out, “I could never have believed you to be such an unfeeling brute!”
And with that she burst into tears.
François looked at Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara for comfort. They avoided his eyes and looked instead at Nonnie, and he knew where their sympathies were. Only Hintza, glancing first to Nonnie and then to him, so puzzled was he, stayed shivering with apprehension by his side.
All at once he was full of remorse and the doubts which had been forming within him became a single clear thought. He took Nonnie’s hand and started to speak.
“Please forgive me! Oh please forgive me Nonnie,” he begged her. “Please listen before you condemn me—there is a reason for it. Xhabbo, Nuin-Tara, please come and listen and I’ll tell you why I’ve been forcing us all to march so hard.”
Quickly he confessed his fears to them. He explained in detail why he was convinced that both Nonnie and
Xhabbo had been infected and why it was so important to get to the sea as soon as possible. He was not half-way through his explanation before three pairs of eyes were turned to him, not just full of understanding but of a gratitude anchored in total reassurance and certainty that he had been hurting himself much more in hurting them, and done it all unselfishly and solely out of concern for them. Indeed, Nonnie let out a whimper almost like Hintza, moved towards him and put one arm round Hintza and came to rest with her head on François’s knees and kept close to him as if nothing had ever divided them at all.
François did not spare himself, but having come to the end asked them all to judge and in judging please to tell him what else he could have done? He did not wait for a verbal answer because the pressure of Nonnie’s head on his knees and the eyes of the others told him enough. But he hastened to say how recently he had had a growing feeling that they should go each day only as far as Nonnie and Xhabbo felt they could go. Anything more, he feared now, would only help the disease. There was only one thing; he would have to ask Nonnie and Xhabbo to promise to tell him each day when they had gone far enough, unless of course Nonnie would allow him to decide for her. Knowing her, now that he had told her everything, he was afraid that she might press herself even harder than he had done. And perhaps Xhabbo would let Nuin-Tara decide for him when he had had enough for he was not certain that Xhabbo would not behave exactly like Nonnie in the circumstances.
“Oh yes, please, Coiske,” Nonnie mumbled without lifting her head from the place of comfort where she had found such reassurance and re-communion. “Yes, you will decide for me, and I promise to obey.”
Xhabbo’s reaction was even more marked. He looked at François with great relief. He exclaimed that a disease or two would make no difference between such friends as they were, and no amount of marching, however hard, could ever have made him doubt a brother his heart loved so much as Foot of the Day. What had really troubled him all that time was feeling himself weaken, feeling his liver leaving his body empty and without strength to move with the sun in the sky, as he put it. He was afraid that he had been wrong about the dream and was being punished for bringing about the killing of that singing woman. But now that he had been told the real cause of his weakness, he was full of the feeling that Foot of the Day would make him right as he had done when he had been hurt in the lion trap. He was full of this feeling because his tapping was back now to tell him all would be well.
Xhabbo had not mentioned his tapping for so long and considering that he was ill with a deadly disease as well, this re-emergence of long-distance signalling in his spirit impressed Nuin-Tara even more than Nonnie and François. She jumped up gracefully to her feet and did a little dance of gratitude to the fire, finishing with a backwards dip to a vanishing new moon.
Nonnie and Xhabbo kept to the letter and the spirit of the pact concluded in that camp, which was inevitably named by Xhabbo, “The Place where Four became One”.
From then on, every day François left the three of them to march in the direction Xhabbo decided. He refused to allow Xhabbo to take part in hunting for food, for obvious reasons. He set out alone with Hintza at sunrise and searched far and wide for food in the harsh new western desert, where by day it became more difficult to find game to shoot. It meant that often he walked twelve times farther in the day than the plodding, dogged little line of three in which Nuin-Tara coaxed Xhabbo and Nonnie along like a hen the last two of a brood of chickens.
Somehow, always when their supplies of meat and tubers were about exhausted, he managed to find something to shoot and to enable Nuin-Tara to make the stews and meat-broths their sick companions needed more and more. It became rare for him to rejoin them before twilight and not find Nonnie and Xhabbo already half asleep and having to record the alarming fact that the day’s march, even in a direct line, had been less than the previous one. The strain, the anxiety over Nonnie and Xhabbo, the greatly increased physical exertion made him fear that he might fail to carry the burden for them all, and not bring them safely to the sea.
What would have been minor practical difficulties earlier on became intolerable additions to a weight already almost unbearable as, for instance, coming home at sunset exhausted, only to have to set out again to find the melons for their thirst which Nuin-Tara had failed to get. This thirst in Xhabbo and Nonnie became all the greater as the sickness progressed and their embattled constitutions needed more and more liquid for fighting the disease. So far he had never failed, even on moonless nights, thanks to Hintza’s nose for these things, to find either melons or water, but he feared it was only a matter of time before he would fail in a world of which he had no experience.
Also his supply of ammunition was running low, since Xhabbo’s bow was no longer there to help him shoot lesser game. Often he was forced to use valuable rifle ammunition on shooting desert pigeons, sand grouse and, on one terrible foodless day even button quail which Xhabbo would normally have shot by arrow. Also there was the problem of medicine. None of the medicines he carried were of the slightest use against sleeping sickness. He had foreseen all other possible infections of the blood. He had medicines for malaria, dysentery and any of the infections that the bite or claws of a wild animal or scratches from any thorn could inflict. But he had never thought of this. The only drugs of any use were the pain-killers and sleeping draughts, and these he had to ration, administering them only after their last meal at night, so that Nonnie and Xhabbo at least could sleep relatively well. But it meant that they had to endure walking like sleep-walkers in a nightmare of pain in the heat of the day, un-sedated and with only their will and courage to drive on their aching and weakening bodies. And of these medicines, counting them like a miser his coins, on the night they had made their pact he had only enough for another seventy-three days.
Nonnie, though she never complained and would never have told François, had a fear of her own which made her oddly immune, by sheer disproportion, to what she was suffering physically. Often she would look at François and her heart, as Nuin-Tara would have put it, turned to water. She saw how much taller he had grown, how his shoulders had widened but also how gaunt he had become. He had never had any fat on him but here in this unforgiving desert light she was frightened to see how fine-drawn, how distinct the aristocratic line of bone beneath the skin had become, and how deep and great the purple-blue eyes were now behind the absurdly long eyelashes, so wasted on a young man, since they were overlong even for shade against the sun. His face and arms were almost burnt black; his hair was beginning to lengthen like a girls, and, always unusually fine, was now bleached into a strange, platinum colour. Even the ridiculous eyelashes—and the sight nearly made her cry—had their tips dipped in the platinum of the inexorable sun. Looking at a face that to her was the most beautiful and beloved in the world, she would cross herself and pray, “Dear Mother in Heaven, I don’t mind dying for myself, I feel so ill, but don’t let me die, because what will become of François if I do?”
And in this she was as truly objective as any human being could possibly ever be. By being utterly the subject of her emotions, by going down into herself to the point where she was the last strained link between the world without and the world within her, by being in this process utterly the subject of the life to which her flesh and blood had been so urgently contracted, she attained a startling, crystal, objective clarity she had never before experienced, and knew that her concern in this was not for her own self but totally for François. She realised how from the moment her father had first taken her away from Silverton Hill and kept her for a year at a finishing school in Europe, she had had a crystal vision of the day when she would be François’s guide in her world as he had been hers in the world of nature. This vision had gained in detail and magnitude and authority with every day of the march behind them, because of her knowledge that Hunter’s Drift and the world of François’s childhood had gone for ever, and that as he had pledged her there would be no looking back. She could not see
François and his Hintza on their own coping with the world as she knew it. She could not bear to see all that was to her something so pure, innocent, upright and true go unarmed and vulnerable into what she now feared despite her youth, was a twisted, devious, calculating and selfish world, armed to the teeth for its own slanted purposes. She had accordingly seen herself as a kind of heroic Amazon, fighting off the world to give François the time to grow into the man who would deliver her from any need of playing the unfeminine role to herself. She had an eloquent picture of François, uncorrupted, confirmed and wise in the ways of her world, taking his place by her side, to defend them both there as he defended them now. She never doubted for a moment that chance and circumstance, which so mysteriously and with such a complex, infinite and resourceful precision had combined to bring them together, from such totally different backgrounds and from such unlikely and remote points of departure, could have done so without some grand design of its own.
A Far Off Place Page 41