It might not sound much but this look of accusation in the cow and other animals in Europe was a look he found everywhere to some degree in the world of nature. There was no need to expand on this to François and enlarge on how this exploitation which produced that look, extended even to the earth and its contents, like oil and coal, gold, platinum, iron; the same great exploitation was everywhere there as well. And in their own Africa already the signs of the same great heartlessness to the claims of nature were multiplying as fast among black as among white. The European threat was spreading fast into an Africa which their ancestors had sought out, convinced that they could make it a model for all mankind.
François would remember how at Hunter’s Drift, even the bravest signs of nature as they issued, so certain of their right to exist in the universe, as for example in the call of the lion, had become dulled. Even the lions had begun to roar in almost a perfunctory way as if the joy of it had left them for ever. Even in his own great game reserve, he had seen the animals sprayed with dust from the crammed buses of curious tourists, so that they got up and turned away, disgusted with an intrusion that would not let them be and respect their privacy.
All this to François, remembering how the voice of Old Black Lightning had come up out of the desert at “The Place where Nonnie sang to the Lion”, remembering also with infinite nostalgia its last, valedictory roar as it left them to return to the world of lightning, thunder and rain, was like a pain in his heart.
He had to put his hand in Mopani’s for comfort and hear him declare that he nonetheless was certain that, whatever the world said or did, as long as there were people like Ouwa and, he hoped he was not immodest, himself and, above all, François who still cared and grieved, and who would hold on to the meaning of the inner voice that had called them first to Africa and live openly by it among their people, giving it its contemporary idiom, there would be hope that the meaning would not only be preserved but increased. For that was how all real change began; a change of position in some lone, inexperienced and suffering heart like Ouwa’s, not in great collective resolutions and movements and concensus of established opinion. Only one heart had to find its own true position and travel on from there and all the rest would follow, for no matter how isolated the one felt itself to be, in the deeps of life all were united and no one could move accurately without all ultimately moving with it; just as no star could make a lawful change of course without all the others keeping station with it.
He hoped therefore that François would not try to re-establish Hunter’s Drift in the image of what Ouwa had made it, nor abandon it and go out into the world to look elsewhere for his answers as he now could because he and Nonnie had more money than they had ever had before. Rather, he hoped François would equip himself first with the necessary knowledge and contemporary skills, the mastery of facts to match his feelings, go to college and university, and then return to stand fast in his own context of Africa, resolved never to let anything drive him away, but work to bring it back into harmony with the voice of their original calling, and of that great natural surround of Africa which still made it almost the only continent in the world with a soul of its own.
At the moment there was not a plant, bird or animal in Africa that would not breathe a profound sigh of relief if the last of men should suddenly vanish from the earth. They would have to change. If life on earth were to survive, not a single man, plant bird or animal must be allowed to lose its life except through some great necessity of life itself. And in the losing all men should join in with every plant and animal and bird to praise it and mourn its passing as that of something infinitely precious that had given life the service for which it had been conceived and rendered itself well. He was an old man now, but he was going to stand fast. He would ask François and Nonnie to stand fast in this spirit beside him.
He asked this without qualification because of a strange kind of confirmation he had experienced just before he heard the news that François and Nonnie were miraculously alive. It was a kind of confirmation the thin-lipped, rational, materialistic men of our time would scorn, but somehow he knew that it would be as decisive for François as it had been to him. It was simply this. On the way out of his own great Reserve a complete reversal of his sense of reality seemed to take place. François would remember the two imposing gates at the main entrance which were always opened at dawn and shut at sunset. Visitors passing through the gates at dawn, he was told, always felt they were entering a fortress of wildlife, a besieged place where a desperate battle was being fought to preserve nature. When they left the Reserve again they would speak as if they were going back into the real and greater world. But on this particular occasion with all these things he had discussed with François on his mind, the oddest of sensations overwhelmed him. He felt acutely that he was not going out into the real world at all, but entering not even a fortress so much as a new kind of menagerie, a prison in which partial forms of life were being preserved in a condition of unreality against some macrocosmic reality of which his reserve appeared a microcosm. Of course he was strangely restless, dissatisfied and despondent at the moment. Yes-no, he had the most contradictory sort of feelings assailing him, as for instance that the older he grew, the closer he was drawing to the past; the nearer his physical end, the closer his beginning, as if end and beginning were one in something greater than either. In a way which would have no meaning for a mere logician, the past stretched endlessly before him, the future long behind, and only this world of natural beauty, vivid and immediate with instinctive life that he was leaving, possessing intimation of ultimate reality. Yes-no, it was larger and more urgent than real, and charged with a kind of exhortation and a calling, through all sorts of odd flashes of remembered beauty that emerged with a rainbow vividness out of the darkness of his mind.
Suddenly he was full of memories of the beauty of all the sunsets and daybreaks he had ever seen in the bush; the rounded sound of the unimpeded song of the uninhibited bird, the lightning voice of the lion, the triumphal arch the impala imposed high on the columns of its flight, the look of morning in the eye of the kudu and the fall of night in those of the purple inyala; the victory roll of the peacock-blue winged and lilac breasted im-Veve, the spitfire bird that their people knew as the pledge of truth; the lamp of the lynx; the fire of leopard and flame of the lion; the glitter of the red and mauve tsessebe moving exultant with the song of the wind of its own speed in its ears; the star-glitter of the voice of the crickets performing their devotions at night; the measure of the elephant; the hymn to the sun of the Mopani beetles and the Halleluja of the massed choir of birds at nightfall and daybreak; the flake of snow of an ibis falling out of the high noon blue and the plover’s sea-whistle farewell to the star of morning. All these and many more which François could imagine for himself were with him just then, not just as visions of things of beauty but like a reveille on a trumpet calling his senses to awake and fulfil the abundance of life reflected in the mirror of the garden at their beginning. Yes, he had said beginning deliberately because as he had implied, he now believed it was posed there not as a record of what had already been but as a kind of miraculous mirror to reflect the invisible in what is to come.
Then in the midst of searing regret at leaving his own natural world and the dissatisfaction caused by these glimpses of a total beauty that was not yet, he came out of himself to see one of the greatest thunderstorms he had ever seen in Africa bearing down on him with divine solemnity. He just had a glimpse of the sun vanishing behind a cathedral of Gothic cloud, two archangelic wings of light stretching far, wide and high on either side of the tumultuous spire, illuminated with lightning and shaking with reverberations of thunder, when the smell of rain falling on the parched earth many miles away reached him. It came to him on a cool wind travelling from the storm, like breath of sacred spirit, and rose like incense in the cathedral of the storm piled above him. The lightning at once was divine revelation and the thunder the voice of its meaning.
He had never known a more naturally religious moment.
Suddenly the restlessness left him and an urge to take part in the renewal of life which that smell of the rain on earth evoked possessed him. And then he was riding down an aisle of cloud into the presence of the storm itself and the long lightning of Africa, the longest lightning on earth, striking deep into the parched ground and after each flash, a long roll of thunder like the voice of creation itself, followed by a greater downpouring of rain than ever. Normally he might have got off his horse, because such storms were notoriously dangerous to man on horseback, but there was no apprehension of danger in him, only the most intense feeling that this was how life should be; first the heart of man filled with an unutterable longing to accomplish in the manner those evocations of beauty he had just mentioned commanded him and then the rain of the doing of it. Yes, this longing of his, he was certain, was part of the longing for rain which the drought-stricken earth of Africa around him had sustained for millenniums over and over again against all odds of hopelessness of fulfilment and rejection by the sun.
Yes-no, he knew then that all began in an improbable longing and in the sustaining of the longing against all odds of man and nature, and in the end the lightning would flash, the thunder sound and the rain fall and the brave earth be made full of increase. So it was with the human heart. The storm for him was intensely allegorical. The longing of man, the longing of the earth for rain, the same call of love to serve the increase of meaning with the greatest immediacy of which nature was capable, first in lightning, then in thunder and rain. Indeed, so great was the immediacy of the storm that those three were not different and distinct time processes but only one and indivisible moment. More, the storm was so violent and so great that nothing that was false could withstand it. All round him, for instance, ant-eroded and worm-rotted trees crashed down and only what was true, upright and growing remained, so that he recognised storm, suffering and disaster, however terrible, as instruments of truth and love and fear at one.
All these things of which he had spoken, far from being reduced before the power and majesty of the storm, seemed at home in it and invested with new authority by it to such an extent that he, Mopani, felt they had brought him to the place where meaning was made, where the paint of dawn, the colour of sunsets, the lightning, the thunder, the rain and the wind of morning were born.
He felt this so keenly that he just had to dismount and stand beside the head of Noble, put his arm round his neck and say for both of them a new kind of Lord’s Prayer that came unbidden to him there. He no longer remembered the whole of the prayer and recollected mainly the feelings associated with it, above all the feeling that he, Noble and the storm and earth were all counterpointed in the same abiding rhythm. Only he was certain that his words were not addressed to the Lord in Heaven alone. François must forgive him if it sounded arrogant because he had not felt less arrogant and more humble than at that moment at the altar, as it were, in the great temple of the storm, but he was convinced that there was something lacking in a unique approach through the Father, wonderful as that was. It was just this. His prayer began, “Our Father, which art in Heaven, Thy will be done. Our mother, which art in earth, thy love be fulfilled, and love and will made one.”
All that followed was implicit in that approach; the will to do and the love to fulfil made sheer and immediate and abundant in man as the lightning, the thunder and the rain of the storm. He, Mopani, like François, had known to the full nostalgia for the bush into which they had been born. He knew only too well the hurt of it but great as that nostalgia was, it was nothing to this home-sickness for the future that presided over his prayer. For him this confirmation was absolute and final, and that was why he had spoken to François as confidently as he had done.
And that, he remarked with his wryest of smiles, was the over-long testament of all he would like to leave François, far more than all the worldly possessions he had long since willed to him.
François was unable to reply to Mopani at once, so moved was he, and Mopani wisely did not ask for an answer. The answer was in the feeling François gave out that a child at last had found the man, as he, Mopani had found the child in François. Indeed there was neither the need, nor any such thing as an immediate answer beyond that, but only the challenge to live life from then on so that it could be a process of growth into some sort of an answer. There were no short cuts to creation, Mopani knew, as Ouwa had known it. All creation was slow, patient and loving growth until suddenly one day it issued from the heart of man like lightning, sheer and immediate into new being. Yet he knew, by the last fire in camp later, that the living towards the answer had already begun when he heard François say to Hintza, “Now you would grin less, Hin, if you knew where I am taking you. You’re to be the first dog in Africa to go to college. What shall we do with you there? What is it to be—Economics, Political Philosophy, or the humanities?”
Hintza looked back so tragically puzzled, that François stroked him immediately and declared confidingly, certain that it would relieve Hintza of his bewilderment, “Don’t worry, my beloved little old insect, my little old goggatjie! The humanities and a touch of classical music it shall be for you. But what about you, Nonnie?”
Nonnie, smiling, happy and infinitely relaxed, was thinking, “Anything, anything as long as we three are never separated for a split second again,” answered with a mischievous pretence of a condescension she was far from feeling, “I might consider medicine if you begged me, François. I think I’d like the idea of healing the sick, particularly animals and people suffering from sleeping sickness. And you?”
François did not answer her directly. He thought long and hard and then said obliquely, as if far away, “The first thing we’ll do when we finish with our new schooling is to come back to find Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara and save them and their people from extinction.”
Mopani, in the silence that followed, took out of his pocket a long telegram, to say, almost apologetically, “Little cousin, I have something here I haven’t shown you before. It asks something of you both I hope you will agree to do. I think it is perhaps the most positive and hopeful thing that has come out of all this. It’s an invitation to go north to the oldest kingdom in Africa and there receive on behalf of the new nations of Africa some form of compensation for the injury done to you and Nonnie. It is important because although there are some African nations who did not associate themselves with this request, the news of your and Nonnie’s story caused as much dismay among millions of Africans as anywhere else. There is something, I don’t quite know what, to be presented to you both, except that I believe it represents the feelings of many of your black countrymen, above all the young among them, and I hope you will say yes.”
One longs to linger over this last night by the fire near the renewing water of Mantis, the god of Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara, the god of the great in the small, where they slept for the last time in the desert with the sea sounding like a last post of nature over their last journey.
Some mornings later François, Hintza and Nonnie were driven in a large Rolls-Royce to a palace on the side of a mountain in the far north of Africa in a capital called “The New Flower”. The same blue of Africa they had seen in the blue over the desert in the far south was there to proclaim the kinship of north and south and the basic community of the earth in between, so that they did not feel themselves to be in such a strange new country as they might have done, but almost as if another room of a home of many mansions.
As they stepped out of the car at the Palace entrance, Nonnie and François and Hintza were startled to see that they had to pass between two enormous live lions lying on pedestals, as watchdogs over the doorway itself. Involuntarily they both looked down at Hintza, knowing his complex about lions. They saw him draw back and stand almost contorted in a struggle with himself. His hair from his toes to his spine, indeed every bit of hair on his burnished body was standing on parade and to attention. He fought hard and long with himself
before a new look of resolution appeared on his face and he stepped, determinedly and ritualistically forward as if he too were obeying Mopani’s injunction and accepting what was nearest at hand as his own special task in life. Slowly he came up to the pedestal of the nearest lion, lifted his leg and sprayed it, as if he were putting out a fire.
“Gosh François,” Nonnie exclaimed, scarlet with embarrassment, not of the deed but the thought that it was not something that could be done to the lions of so great a king, “d’you see what that incredible hound of yours is up to? Shouldn’t you try and stop him? He can’t do that to lions of Judah and get away with it!”
“No Nonnie, certainly not,” François, the happy light of a smile in his eyes, answered back. “No, he’s just getting rid of that old complex of his for good.”
And so they went into a thickly carpeted room, hung with satins and ancient Byzantine-looking tapestries. A footman in satin opened an inner doorway and they were summoned in. An old gentleman, small in stature but looking almost tall because of the height of his spirit, came forward to meet them. Nonnie immediately dropped a graceful curtsey and Hintza, his reflexes of the quickest, now that he had finally put the lion in its place, went down so fast beside her that his chin hit the floor and was flat on the ground, from where, shaken but unabashed, he looked up searchingly out of his large purple eyes, to see what manner of a person it was that could make him curtsey as not even the greatest of baboons had ever done.
A Far Off Place Page 47