Meanwhile, as is the way in ships, rumours of François’s mission and what he had gone through had flashed through all quarters of the great ship. When François and Hintza appeared on the flight deck, some thousand members of the crew assembled there spontaneously gave them the most rousing of naval cheers. It made François tremble at the knees, but sent Hintza, hardly knowing how to hold his head for pride, high-stepping out towards them, not aware that it was all that François could do to get himself to the helicopter, already warmed up and waiting. Those hurrahs and the feeling of return, welcome and goodwill and all else given to him, made it difficult to say goodbye and thank you adequately to the Admiral, who saluted him and Hintza as if they were his superiors. He barely managed to become sufficiently composed in the helicopter afterwards to beg Michael Featherstone not to fly over or too near the camp he had left behind, explaining what unfortunate associations they all had with helicopters. As a result they landed on the far side of the dune nearest to the camp, to let François and Hintza out first.
Hintza, knowing what they were about, was ready to dash at full speed towards their camp, assuming that François himself would want to do it at the run, but François stopped him, knowing how Hintza would outrun even himself. He took a leaf from his dispatch book and quickly wrote, “Nonnie, all is well. I’m coming fast with all the help we need. Please prepare Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara for visitors and tell them not to be alarmed.”
He folded up the note, tucked it underneath Hintza’s collar which Nonnie had bought him, and told him, “There, Hin, run as you’ve never run before and take this to Nonnie. Quick Hin, quick!”
The rear-admiral, Michael Featherstone, the medical orderly and nine sailors unloading blankets, food, thermos flasks of meat broth, not omitting chocolate, milk and other foods and comforts, found themselves held by the sudden crackle of electricity of the Bushman command on François’s lips, and even more by the amazement of seeing Hintza vanish; an elongated streak of burning gold over the summit of the dune. One Cockney sailor could not restrain himself from telling his companions that Cor, and tickle him pink, but that wild and likely-looking lad seemed to speak the language of dogs as well as humans, let alone old ironside admirals, for if they had not noticed it, he certainly had. That “old dreadnought” of theirs was just about ready to eat out of that young cock sparrer’s hand.
François did not hear him, because he was already following in his long hunting stride after Hintza, so naturally and easily that the Commander remarked to the Rear-Admiral, “He’s not only got the eyes of an antelope, that young fellow, but he runs like one as well.”
As a result, François arrived in the camp in time to amplify the news in his note and to help Nonnie and Xhabbo to sit up to watch the procession of eleven; the Rear-Admiral in the lead followed by Commander Featherstone and nine marines almost up to their knees in the sand under the load of blankets and other provisions they were carrying.
François had never seen, even in Mopani, so great a delicacy and gentleness as that of the naval doctor examining Nonnie and Xhabbo. After their examination he gave them injections against their pain, took some blood samples and then drew François aside. He explained that he was as convinced as François that Miss Monckton and the chap with the unpronounceable name had sleeping sickness and that he would not wait on the result of the analysis of the blood samples but treat them the next day when, he was absolutely certain, the right drugs would arrive by aeroplane.
“But of course the quickest way to get these people well,” he added dutifully, his hand on the anxious François’s shoulder, “would be to take them to hospital. I can easily arrange that and they would be bedded down in the capital almost as soon as the drugs could get here. It would be the right thing to do, you know.”
“Oh no!” exclaimed François, going quite pale at the thought. “It would be the death of them, at least the death of him,” indicating Xhabbo.
However, he realised that perhaps he had sounded ungracious, and he explained about Xhabbo, and the Bushman horror of being shut in, ending, “You see, sir, it’ll have to be here with us all together, as we’ve been since the beginning.”
“How stupid of me,” the surgeon hastened to reply. “Of course you’re right, it’s just got to be here.”
Two hours after sunrise the next day, François, for whom life had suddenly become all light again and the darkness behind already little more than the shadow of a dream, was just happy to be sitting near Nonnie and his friends who thanks to their injections had passed a night almost free of pain. They were well enough to be raised to sit up and watch a big military transport plane pass overhead. Barely another hour later a helicopter, not hesitating on this occasion to appear right over the camp, hovered there for a moment and then came down at the far end of their meadow of sand. The naval doctor reappeared and came hurrying to give Nonnie and Xhabbo the first of the right injections. The very next morning François thought he could already see signs of improvement, and knew that any fears he had left, were now laid for good.
Meanwhile, the helicopter which brought the doctor also brought an urgent request for François to return to the flagship, which he could not refuse. This time he left Hintza behind, full of reproach because his newly developed taste for the sea and stirrings of an ambition to qualify as an ocean-going dog, a master-mariner of his kind, were being denied as soon as born.
François spent the morning and the whole afternoon going over his journey, answering the most searching questions from the Admiral and his D.N.I. That very night, as a result, on radio in Britain, America and in Europe, on television screens and from printing presses, the first factual account of the massacre and what had followed, the long pursuit and their hazardous journey, indeed a summary of all the main facts were presented to millions of people in that complex of the spirit which is the western world. Brief and official as this account was, it could not help out of its very nature to savour so much of the unusual and to be so evocative that it fired the imaginations of newspaper editors and purveyors of contemporary affairs as nothing had done for years. At once instructions were going out for strategically placed special correspondents of newspapers and magazines from Britain, America, Germany, France, Sweden, Italy and Japan to name only a few countries, to hasten to the scene so that their readers could have more.
François, completely innocent of how interest in their fate and their story would sweep like a grass fire through the imagination of the great outside world, at the end of his interview with the admiral and the D.N.I. asked for one last favour. He asked it very diffidently of men whom he felt had already done more than he in his wildest dreams would have thought men could do for one another in so hard a world. He asked if they could please transmit a telegram for him too. This was addressed to Colonel H. H. Théron, c/o Parks and Reservations Board in the capital. How strange François felt, writing out the formal address of Mopani—whom he was not even sure was still alive. The message merely read, “Hope you too are safe and well. Nonnie and I have arrived safely at the sea. Please come to us as soon as possible. We need you. François and Hintza.”
It was on the tip of the D.N.I.’s tongue to say, “You must be a bit more precise, my lad. The sea’s a big place, and unless you are more explicit, this Colonel Théron, whoever he is, will hardly know which end of it to go to.”
But one look at François’s trusting face, made keen and desperately young by the thought of Mopani, implying so clearly that for the moment the only point on the sea that could possibly matter in the universe and be described as such, just had to be the place at which he and his friends had arrived, made the D.N.I. rebuke himself. After all, he could easily deal with this deficiency in the signal himself.
When François had gone, the Admiral remarked, “You know, D.N.I., I can’t get over it. You must have noticed it too. That boy told his story as if he were quite unaware of how remarkable it is. He’s full of praise for his friends but he doesn’t seem to be aware that he
himself has done anything worth mentioning; no indication at all that he knows how he was challenged by fate in a way I would not like to be, and asked to do something that no young fellow really ought to be asked to do. He just talked about it as if it were all a fact of life that one in his position had to expect. I do believe he won’t know how incredible it is until somebody else tells him, and I doubt even then if he’ll agree. That to me is perhaps the really extraordinary aspect of the most extraordinary affair I’ve ever encountered.”
And it is a pity perhaps that the Admiral did not talk to François about it, for he would have discovered that there was no conscious suppression of egotistical self-esteem in François. After all, it was only natural in one brought up as he was and who for instance at his most impressionable age had to witness young Matabele boys, barely in their teens, naked and armed only with their wits, take on the challenge of crocodile and lion as on the day of the “washing of the horns”. Life constantly exposed to the threat of death was a platitude of his upbringing, and he had no thought ever of its making exceptions for him. Besides, in so far as François felt he might have achieved anything at all, he was convinced that he owed it not to himself but to what he described as the prompting over his shoulder of others; above all Ouwa, ’Bamuthi and Mopani, and so could claim little credit for himself.
The great and dazzling hero for him was Xhabbo; the real courage and unselfish endeavour, his and Nuin-Tara’s. As for Nonnie, there were no words to express what he felt about her part in the journey. She was the least prepared for such an ordeal. She could even have been expected to fail. Indeed she could have been pardoned for failing and fatally imperilling them all. Hers was courage of the highest quality of all, because her fear must have been the greatest; her endurance of the highest, since her physical preparation at the outset was lowest.
Three days later, just after mid-day, François was talking to Nonnie and Xhabbo in camp, a Nonnie and Xhabbo who were already restored to something of their lively and habitually bright, conversational selves, when he heard the familiar noise of the helicopter approaching. They saw it come like a great yellow spider over the top of the smoking, singing dune and land in its usual place on the far side of the dry river-bed. He got up and, followed by Hintza, went over towards it at leisure. Yet, even now that he knew the sound, still as always with his rifle at the ready on his arm. Nonnie could not help smiling affectionately and saying to herself, “When we get back to civilisation, I’ll have to see he doesn’t take that damned gun of his to bed.”
And watching him, she suddenly saw François start and then break into his fastest run. A very tall and oddly familiar figure had jumped, as if still young, from the helicopter and was striding with the long-distance stride of a born hunter towards François. Above the dying splutter of the engines, the pitch and quality of the glittering shout, “Mopani!” made her turn quickly away from her companions, to hide the eruption of tears in her eyes.
When she could look again, she saw what she had always thought one of the nicest things about life in the bush at Hunter’s Drift, the boy only just a man unashamedly embracing a child-like man.
She could easily imagine what they were feeling and saying to one another but could hardly see them because Hintza was running round the two, jumping and bounding with such fantastic energy that they were hidden in a cloud of dust. Then out of the dust the two of them appeared arm in arm, Mopani with one hand trying to calm Hintza, saying again and again, “There now, Hin, there boy, I’ve told you and I tell you again for the last time, Nandi’s all right, ’Swayo’s all right, and so is Noble.”
At last the message got through to Hintza. He streaked across the space in between to bring the good news to Nonnie, Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara. He whimpered it in the ears of each of them and then in a mad dash threw himself in fast circles round the camp. Then he was off again to François and Mopani.
Mopani’s greeting of Nonnie was as gentle as it was delicate and comforting to her. It made her feel she was at once taken to the centre of that tight circle that enclosed François and the hunter. But for Mopani it was a greeting made difficult by the shock of seeing what he remembered as one of the most beautiful, healthy young girl faces he had ever seen, now so thin and ill and at the same time poignant, with a new loveliness as of something imperishable burnt in it by the fire of a suffering few are called upon to endure, and fewer still at so early an age. But his introductions to Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo completed, Mopani allowed himself to be seated by the fire and was persuaded to have some hot chocolate with them all. Because of Hintza’s and Xhabbo’s preference for these things it had become the equivalent of champagne in their camp.
He sat there upright, circumspect and fastidious, as if he had not just flown some two thousand miles to come to them but just emerged from his own room, bathed and dressed in newly pressed clothes. His pointed Quixotic beard was as trim as ever; the skin of ivory on his forehead where his hat normally protected it was by contrast with the tanned features below, as startlingly young and smooth as ever; a visual paradox of innocence and experience that had always moved Nonnie as it did François, and in the process abolished all imposition of years between them. His wide hunter’s hat with glowing leopard skin band was perched on his knee as he spoke, and one would have thought his appearance as timeless as it had always been in the past, were it not for the look in his eyes, which showed how wounded even his staunch spirit had been by all that had happened at Hunter’s Drift and after, above all from the conviction that the future which had always been specially implicit for him in François, was apparently extinguished for ever.
Sitting there then, restored to his dearest role in life, he told them something which lifted the curtain of unknowing on their past and so conveyed the first intimation of how they had not gone through all in vain. He told them that as a result of François’s desperate dash for his camp, one of the messengers dispatched by “the major” he had left in charge, had got through the ring of invaders and intercepted him and Noble as they were travelling home in the company of Hintza’s distinguished parents, Nandi and ’Swayo. Some miles farther on he would have run into the ambush prepared for him and no doubt would have been killed. He described how for more than a year now a desperate, highly organised guerilla war had been fought in the region of Hunter’s Drift, how both François and Nonnie had been thought dead, because the day after he had been forewarned, a reconnaissance aeroplane had brought back a devastating description of François’s gutted home and everybody was convinced that they must all have been killed, since the messenger who intercepted Mopani had known nothing about the origin of the message itself.
So when Mopani returned with the advanced forces brought up against the invaders, he found his old headquarters too burned out and everyone killed. He owed his life therefore to François, Xhabbo and indeed Nuin-Tara and Nonnie too, as well as Hintza. But almost more significant still, in the last few months a marked change had come over the situation. The enemy which had been gathering in strength, had suddenly appeared to weaken and begun to withdraw. He thought that could only have happened because the “singing tree” had suddenly ceased to sing.
He gave François and Nonnie just time enough to translate the impact of this for Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara and to witness the transfiguration of meaning caused by the news, reflected in their eyes, before declaring that for the moment, their exchanges would have to be left to that brief factual level. He apologised profoundly that he had been forced by events just to greet them and see that they had all that they needed. Now, if Nonnie would allow it, and Nonnie was thrilled by the way he asked her permission, as if he already completely accepted the claims of a very special relationship between François and herself, the same events compelled him to take François away on urgent business in the flagship.
This urgent business was that in the plane which had brought Mopani, he had travelled with several newspaper men dispatched from all over the world to get the full story. Mopani knew enou
gh about François and enough about the world to realise how exacting an ordeal it would be for him. The last thing he could allow was the descent without warning of many sophisticated gatherers of news into the midst of François’s camp. So he had persuaded the Admiral that the press conference on which the Admiralty in London had insisted, should take place in the flagship and that it should be limited to an hour only and with him present to assist François. The Admiral had readily seen the point and agreed.
So François, this time accompanied by Hintza, for he felt it would be too cruel to separate Hintza from Mopani who was like father and mother to Hintza’s parents, and who after all had brought Hintza into his life, walked into the ward-room of the flagship where the talk was as loud as the sound of the bees he had heard at their devotions in the cathedral of ants on the day of “The Annunciation of Honey”. Oh, how far away and full of light suddenly that morning seemed! As they went in, with Hintza confidently in the lead, alive and glowing, looking like a dog modelled on one of those great hunting archetypes carved on Scythian coins of gold, the assembly, who were just on their third pink gin, stopped talking with a suddenness that was almost comic, and stared at them with unbelief.
François, Mopani and Hintza went in total silence to stand in front of them, so that François, on Mopani’s advice, as well as out of his own instinct, could tell his story in the deliberate, even, factual and contracted manner natural to him, and leave out for the moment the facts that his guides and companions across the desert were Bushmen. He did this because he feared the additional sort of reprisals that might be carried out against defenceless Bushmen in the desert, should this fact become known by their enemies and friends of their enemies. But all the same he felt a Judas for referring to people who in his estimation were the real heroes of the story as “a friendly indigenous hunter and his wife”.
A Far Off Place Page 44