The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

by Wilma Stockenstrom

  I think the two of them had underestimated the game. It also seemed to me that they realized this but were absolutely refusing to acknowledge it. Now it was a matter of pushing on, pushing through. It was a fact that somewhere in the distance lay cities that carried on commerce. It was known that the earth was ultimately ringed around with water. One day, one day, suddenly, unexpectedly, there would loom up before our eyes a blueness which, as we approached, would grow distinct from the blue haziness of the sky and announce itself as a separate entity, as being composed of water, as being water, as being water in motion with waves with foam backs and splashing foam flakes. As being the water firmament on the edge of eternity. And we would hear a pounding and perhaps seabirds. And the last stretch we would all run.

  Ah, how pleasant to meditate ahead, to listen, see, smell, feel ahead. To imagine experiences.

  Our stock of food was diminishing and gave cause for concern. We grew dependent on the skill of the slaves and the knowledge of the wilds they had acquired as children to supplement our food. Thus, for example, they picked out a round orange fruit full of big pips with a thin layer of nice sweet flesh. And they picked out edible grubs: they pulled them off the leaves and pinched their heads off and baked what was left – which was not much – in the hot ashes.

  I was imprudent enough to compliment them foolishly and long-windedly. I looked them boldly in the eye, created a relationship of familiarity, then cupped my hands and got a share of their fruit, berries, grubs, roots. Then I went and sat down with my gift halfway between them and the stranger and the eldest son. After a while the stranger came to join me and I gave him some of what I had. Then he shared his little with the eldest son. A complicated system. But the situation was not yet critical.

  Funny incidents, like the time the eldest son caught a freshwater turtle and tried to roast it in the shell. It gave off such an intolerable stench that we all retired and no one would let it pass his lips, including the catcher and roaster.

  Less amusing the incident with the sable antelope hit by lightning. Looking back I can in fact laugh bitterly. I can still see the stranger bringing out his elegant little dagger with the handle inlaid with jewels – emeralds and carnelians polished till they glittered – and trying to slice through the skin of the antelope’s belly. He must have begun there because he thought the skin would be thinner in the groin.

  Some distance away the slaves stood grimly looking on after unanimously deciding not to touch what seemed to us a lavish gift. A first sign of mutiny, perhaps? I don’t know. The eldest son contributed by holding the antelope fast by the horns. The animal anyhow had no kick left in it. The stranger gave up the struggle. No one thought of looking for butchering equipment among the goods we were carrying. Or an axe or a spear or something of the kind.

  The antelope’s glassy eyes were looking at me wherever I circled around him, I thought fearfully. Perhaps the lightning bolt had merely stunned him. But no, he was really dead. We had chased pied crows away from him. These had not yet gone. They were hobbling about here self-righteously. Waiting. Waiting. Till the tedious human left. When I looked up I noticed a vulture in a treetop. The stranger gave a snort of laughter when I approached and asked why he did not look for equipment in the supplies.

  Both he and the eldest son had from the very beginning pushed their weapons into one of the packs because it was too much trouble to keep them continually at hand. They were simply in the way. What prevented the slaves from overpowering the two of them, doing away with them, and making off? Were they then so unmanned? I thought I detected a glint in the slaves’ eyes. They were watching like the crows were.

  From the tiny slit the stranger had made with his dagger in the belly a slow dark fluid oozed on to the white hair. The air smelled wonderfully fresh after the rain. I wished we would leave. One could see a rainbow. There, far away at its foot slept the lightning. I wished a lightning flash would make the sable jump up and storm us.

  Summer was starting to grow full and ripe. It was in winter that we had last seen the sea. Vague salty damp memory. Grown so used to this routine.

  After an evening’s consultation the two leaders decided we should cross the great river along whose bank we had been walking for a while now, so as not to lose our course yonder towards the sunset. Their joint fright at the prince or commander and his subjects or troops in the hollowed-out tree trunks had moderated the discord between them. This nearly flared up again when the stranger teasingly asked the eldest son whether he would be able to pick out a hissing tree for the building of a vessel.

  Would you? asked the eldest son sullenly. Then they both laughed with embarrassment. Here, so far from home and hearth and from the sea, they sensed their relative powerlessness and saw only too well that they did not always have the situation under control. The eldest son slapped his calf with his cane, but listlessly, as if confessing impotence. I saw in their eyes that they did not know what to do. Men look so funny, like disappointed children, when they lose control of something but dare not openly acknowledge it. And I in my peculiar position as parasite hoped fervently that they would find a solution and get us shortly to those cities that were our ostensible goal. Every morning I blossomed at my most beautiful, for them to admire my orchid-like nature for its colorfulness. I gave no less attention to my appearance than in town. My private torments were increasing too. I was utterly dependent on him to whom I was joined by deeds of sale as well as (I hoped to myself) by affection. But utterly dependent like a parasite.

  Time passed and the plan of crossing the river was not carried out. Neither of the two had the inner strength to stand up, call the slaves together, and track down a hissing tree and set to work. In spiritless silence we lingered on the nearside bank. The food supply was now rapidly becoming dangerously low, spurring the slaves to set game traps of raisinwood and one festive day to cook a bustard for us.

  What I could not understand was that the leaders’ obvious lack of resolve did not make the slaves think of quitting us. Every night they meekly allowed the eldest son to chain them together, a measure taken after the one with the money in his hair had escaped. Every night I would hear the rattle of their shackles as they turned over in their sleep. In the mornings the chains would be removed, and no longer neatly rolled up and stored away – no, they were simply thrown in a heap. It was as if we had all become dream beings in a transition to we knew not what. The days unfolded and closed again one after another.

  The river remained a joy to the eye. We were in a place where there were saf-saf willows growing. The eldest son, or perhaps the stranger, had remembered that this was an indication of firmness underfoot should one wish to wade through the river. For such an undertaking we should most certainly have had to wait for winter, even the end of winter. I say so because one of the slaves was ordered to enter the water and see how deep it was. He walked unenthusiastically in till the water reached to below his armpits, then began to swim, and shortly thereafter we heard him cry out and saw the current bearing him along and fellow slaves of his running downstream to keep up with him, calling to him to struggle towards the bank. I saw his head bobbing further and further off on the surface of the water, and the further off the more it looked as if he were floating at his ease. Later his fellow slaves returned. Precisely where he drowned they could not say with certainty.

  It was nice to observe the bee-eaters as they shot across the water after flying insects. The water itself was a brownish green and muscular, and lapped at the banks where rocks or tree stumps protruded. Of the willows only the tops stuck out. The limp branches hung half-drowned. I felt like the willows and let time flow through me. It was nice to hear the bush shrike whistle and never see him. We also grew accustomed to the cicadas.

  The eldest son and the stranger recited poems to each other in solemn tones and asked each other riddles, me too, and once the eldest son sang in a wonderfully deep, rich voice. The stranger wanted to clap him on the shoulder in sincere admiration, but it w
as as if he did not like being touched, and jerked his shoulder away. He told of yearning for his bride. He called her name over and over like someone throwing a jewel from one hand to the other.

  The stranger said: If the sky were now to smash down on us, we would scarcely make a dent in the turf.

  He plucked a handful of lush grass from where he sat and chewed on it, and his eyes closed. He was dreaming. I put my arm around him. It no longer disturbed me that the eldest son could see our caresses. The slap of water soothed me like a refrain. I touched my ivory bracelet. Luck bringer. I kissed it. I had a swelling on my heel that was very painful, and of course mosquito bites all the time. What was that lonely bride left behind doing with her days where she sat without any tidings? What were people doing now in that city? Was there anyone besides the bride who remembered how we had departed?

  Yet we did get to the far bank, and perfectly easily. A day’s journey upstream we floated a roughly carpentered raft out from among the reeds and finch nests, and seeing that an island divided the river into two courses at this point, neither flowing so fatally strongly, we arrived without loss of life or goods first on the island and then on the far bank, where we spent a day to get everything properly in order, to inspect and check over everything. One of the slaves killed an oribi, throwing a knobkerrie that he had carved for himself during our halt from the light yellow wood of the bush willow. With this welcome addition to provisions the expedition once again got into its stride.

  Our pace was quickened. There was a noticeable air of urgency about the two leaders, an alertness long last seen, as if they had undergone a personality change under the effect of the scrap of news about the city in the red desert retailed to us by the hungers. Both now walked at the head of the procession, each taking longer steps than the other, striding more smartly than the other; one even heard them laugh. Their good humor infected all of us. It encouraged industry among the slaves, who, dividing the work more readily in an atmosphere of co-operation rather than supervision, in no way fell behind their owners. We felt jointly attracted by that promised city at the foot of the rose quartz mountain.

  Still, I could not help notice how untidy we looked. From above, from my litter, last of all in the line, I was struck by our slovenliness. It could not be disguised that we looked dirty, worn down and shabby, dusty, our clothes full of fat stains. One of the slaves was no longer even carrying a pack on his head. How was that? What did he think he was doing here? Another had tied rattling round yellow seeds around his ankles that made suru-suru as he walked and one revealed himself to be a notable imitator of bird language, so that sometimes, after hesitating a while, birds whistled back to him in response to his call. It was funny to hear him talk.

  I wonder how I looked to the other. A sorry sight but full of life at least?

  How insignificant our little line of human beings among the tall rough grass stalks, a wholly inconspicuous phenomenon in the midst of frisking herds of zebras and wildebeest and redbuck, and the ever-amazed ostriches. We entered upon highlands where the air was fresher and the wind unceasingly bent the tops of the grass and bush and trees, a billowing in the grass, a jerky nodding from the bushes and a stately response from the trees. The loose hanging stems of creepers swung helplessly about. Their magenta trumpeter flowers peered tremulously yet archly from every level of the host tree. In these more open plains the clouds floated in the blue, independent of each other and came together only at odd times, as if called, to manufacture thunder and lightning and dissolve in rainshowers. We took shelter under trees and waited till they passed. It was colder here. We moved on, a shifting tableau through the days.

  After the city in the distance which must be the intended city, which would have to satisfy all expectations, on which we pinned our hopes, for whose sake we exerted ourselves, mustered our forces, had reorganized ourselves, where we would find shelter, meet people, streets with people, buildings, markets, squares, windows full of smiling women, children in gardens.

  The city – so said the hunters who had advised us to use the raft they had made for themselves from tree trunks and rushes and left lying among the reeds where the island divided the great river – the city lay swept by the wind in a red desert. Sunbaked red walls. And behind it on the horizon rose the rough jagged rosy peaks of the mountains.

  And behind them? asked the stranger.

  And behind them the sea.

  Ah … The sea.

  A slave had been the first to notice the hunters. We felt embarrassed that we could offer them so little in the way of food and drink. Actually they were better off than we were, as we soon noticed, and also much better organized. They were carrying their booty of elephant tusks back to their kraal and were in a hurry because they had been away longer than they had planned. Summer was marching on. The elephants, they explained, had migrated further than usual, thus they had had a long search for them, but patience and endurance had been rewarded. Contentedly they indicated the bundles of tusks. This raw form of ivory looked rather ugly to me, particularly the blunt ends cut out of the flesh, and the texture of the tusks did not look at all like what I wore on my arm. Yet it was claimed that the ivory of this region was of far higher quality than the ivory of elephants hunted beyond the sea from our city. How should I know?

  The hunters were surprised to encounter a woman. One laughed so much that all his tooth stumps showed, and I got furiously annoyed and withdrew. In contrast our two leaders carried on a lively conversation with them. I understood that they wanted to gain as much information as possible, but I could not help feeling the hunters’ stealthy glances on me. After a while I went and hid behind a bush. I heard the eldest son trying to arrange a barter and trying to buy provisions from them. I heard him take cross money out of his embossed leather bag with long soft tassels and let the coins tinkle through his fingers back into the bag; but the hunters were not interested in such a bargain, for, they explained, they had only enough meat for themselves. The eldest son had to put away his heavy cash with nothing achieved.

  The stranger was more interested in the precise direction we should take. The city lay in the sunset, he learned. Still many plains, then the vegetation grew thinner, then the ground between the grass tufts turned to sand, then there was more sand and the tufts would quiver silvery here and there, then the sand would become dunes, they would loom steep and rippled, perfectly formed humps with perfect stillnesses in between, and behind dunes after dunes after dunes which we would wearily climb, there would lie the city.

  But first the waters, said one of the hunters. Yes, confirmed another, first the waters, the great shining, profuse in flowers, profuse in shadows, profuse in game, the reflection that would seem to be a reality out of which tiger fish leapt viciously, where the honeybirds called one on without cease and at dusk the kudu stepped out of the mopani forests and the marabou storks flew up like ghosts to cover the moon with their wings.

  Messages were communicated to the hunters to pass on, when they got back to their kraal, to the ivory traders from the city who would come and buy the tusks. Thus the stranger and the eldest son tried to restore a connection. I had nothing to say. The other slaves were silent too. We existed where we found ourselves at the moment, and they, the stranger and the eldest son, existed from the coastal city as far as here and further as far as the desert city and the other desired cities, and they existed even further than that, they existed as far as over the seas that lay between the lands, and in those lands too they existed. But I was without connection. I was solely I.

  The hunters had barely disappeared from sight when the eldest son and the stranger leapt to work, filled with a feverish zeal that infected the slaves as well, and in a jiffy everything was ready and we could push on, after all the many days of drowsy bewitchment when we had been like sleepwalkers each spun into a cocoon of pleasant absent-mindedness. When the water spirit enchanted us and bound up our thoughts.

  Secretly I was relieved that the hunters had left, for
their lecherous glances felt as if they stuck to me, and I felt that I was struggling to pull the cloying streaks off me, from my breasts and nipples and from my belly; but worst was the feeling of ruttishness they had aroused in me.

  Thus the summer moved on. The great river already lay far away, the city of our desires still in the remote distance.

  One afternoon we halted at the foot of a koppie with a cornice of round rocks. We had by now several times come upon these koppies with tremendous rocks on top. In our coastal region we never saw such formations and we could not help remarking on them. It was almost as if we were discussing art works. We praised their proportion and splendid balance, as it were the craftsmanship and sensitivity with which they were so arranged that it looked as if they would have to roll down and rumble across the veld till they found a little hollow of rest where the sun could crack them open or perhaps till they smashed into another of their sort and splintered.

  Now we wanted to examine such rocks from closer by and climbed the koppie, the eldest son, the stranger and I, while the slaves got supper together unsupervised and made our beds ready. The one who no longer carried anything was the one who gave the orders, I noticed. Strange that he, so unattractive, with his slight build and unremarkable features, had never seemed to me a potential leader, though I must add that till now I had never thought of possible leaders among them. They were simply the slaves, the eunuchs who did the hard work without getting any choice and obeyed the expedition’s leaders without answering back. Could he possibly be of royal blood? One could easily get soppy in one’s speculations. Perhaps he was simply the smartest of them: to judge by his organizational ability that was the most likely explanation. He wore a great white snail-shell about his neck. Still, I thought, he deserved to be watched closely: but I hesitated to express my suspicions to either the stranger or the eldest son.