Once I caught the slave leader opening a pack and taking tools out, adzes and gouges and awls and so forth, which had presumably been brought along to hollow out a tree trunk somewhere where that seemed necessary, a problem that had been surmounted by the use of the hunters’ raft. I saw how lovingly he handled the tools, just like a craftsman. I saw him absorbed in arranging them in categories according to use and size, and saw how he then packed all the tools in again, very neatly, very skillfully. Then he put the pack down with the others.
There was a surprise for us on top of the koppie. Two surprises. The first was remnants, limited but nevertheless there, of stone walls of the same design we had encountered several times previously, only more badly destroyed, or longer in disuse. More dilapidated. No single length stood intact, there were only weathered knee-high fragments overgrown with thorn bushes; but one could infer the builders’ plan from stone block to stone block. In the afternoon sun the stones shone with the same honey color as the blocks against which and over which they were packed. If one could have stayed longer one might have discovered other objects. Where had all the inhabitants gone? We wondered and guessed. Were their skeletons squatting under the earth of the plain around us, undecided whether to rise and brave the dangerous journey to the land of the ancestors, or did they feel abandoned by their descendants? No one left to make a libation. Only wine and hyena laughter. Here something was utterly annihilated. Here was nothing but sorrow, nothing but meaninglessness and battered traces of glory. From below a thin trail of smoke ascended into the sky in confirmation of our entirely superfluous presence. Ah, I sighed, how long are we still to journey?
The second surprise on top of the koppie made me even sadder. The stranger was the first to come upon a cave on the east side, but I was the first to notice the curious drawings on the rock walls. They seemed to look like people, but also like stick insects, painted aimlessly sometimes in a bunch, sometimes singly, sometimes one on top of another in rust-brown and white. Very faint. Who in the name of the creator of all things would have come here to immortalize himself, and in so unfinished a way? It was too odd. Surely not the inhabitants of the walled town. The stranger complained about the lack of finish and the obvious absence of artistic rules in these clumsy attempts. Obviously backward painters from a backward society. Totally amateurish. The work of adult children. Yet not quite. No explanation occurred to us. The little figures so free of all connection, exiled here in the heart of the wilderness. There were too many questions here, and the dreariness of no answers. Here people had come and gone, again come and gone, dreary, to all eternity.
Here, said the eldest son, is one that looks like a buck.
The stranger expatiated tastefully on paintings on parchment and silk that he had seen on his travels in other lands, the richness and subtlety of their use of color and the fine balance between the trees, birds and people – recognizable as trees, birds and people, he emphasized-painted by trained artists and classifiable in schools and trends, and valuable possessions too. With the blade of his dagger he scratched at one of the ridiculous drawings. Someone’s way of passing the time, he decided. It has nothing to do with art. It records nothing, it does not mean to communicate anything, or to satisfy aesthetically. It is functionless. The more the stranger spoke, the more heated he grew about the rock drawings, and in fact now he began to scratch them off.
Here is something that looks like a woman, said the eldest son. It has breasts. Here is a snake, I think. And look here! An elephant with a scalloped back!
He went into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.
I turned my back on the two of them and stood in the mouth of the cave looking out over the darkening veld at the glimmering evening star. Far away I heard the voices of the slaves, but always against the noise of the wind, which sounded now louder, now softer, like breathing. I felt so depressed. I felt as if my throat were about to constrict, I felt as if the incomprehensible were about to choke me and I had to hurl a cry into the wind which would vanish in the wind.
It is all meaningless, I thought, and walked off and descended the koppie alone. I went as far as a jutting rock, and as I stood there I heard myself say something. Not say. Mumble. Stammer. I heard the words fall from my mouth in snatches over the cliff to be swallowed by the wind filled silence, words that spoke of a jackal that would run through the air with a burning tail and set all the air afire. So there sprang a jackal from my mouth. I heard myself prophesy feverishly of languages that yet slept, of strange trees that would one day march out through valleys and over hills and along the mountainsides. I prophesied that there would be a walking around inside the earth. I prophesied that huge grey breakwaters would be thrown against the sea and that vessels would hide under the water and that there would be migrating back and forth and extermination over and again, and when it was all out of me, when all the fibrous sounds were off my tongue, I felt as if something had been gnawing at me, as if I had been gnawed full of holes and no longer obstructed the wind and had become without resistance; and afraid for myself I climbed down the last stretch as quickly as I could and hastened towards the slaves and the conviviality of the fire.
Once there, I asked them if by chance they had heard me. They stared at me stupidly and went on with their tasks. The one who no longer worked, the so-called leader, did not even look at me, did not deign to reply. Nor had the stranger and the eldest son heard me, it seemed, as I inferred after discreetly inquiring. I felt annoyed and very tired and not relieved.
Now it so happened that the stranger and I slept a short distance from the others near our own flickering fire, while the eldest son slept further away, though near the bearers and a big fire. After the sanga cattle disappeared watches had been set nightly. This practical measure had however lapsed and remained forgotten once we had been bewitched by the water spirit. The laxness of these times had certainly given way to enthusiasm and industry once we were on the near bank, but it was diligence that had required neither urging nor supervision. Even the chains had been left behind on the other bank, and the slaves slept free as we did. To tell the truth, they kept watch in turn over the sleepers on their own initiative, and over the ever-dwindling goods, and took decisions ever more independently. Of course their leader.
Now it so happened that the stranger and I never detected signs of conspiracy between the eldest son and the slaves; and yet one morning when we rubbed the sleep out of our eyes, both he and the whole bunch of slaves together with the goods were no longer there. Vanished. Completely. The stranger climbed a termitary and stared all around without success. The veld was simply veld, with veld-noises – a rustle, a twittering, a chirping.
We tried to track them, we urged each other on and had no success. We noticed flattened grass and footprints in the immediate vicinity of the fires, and that was all. We naturally assumed that if the eldest son and the slaves had decided to proceed with the expedition without us, they would have walked in the direction of the sinking sun, but that way too we detected nothing that looked to us like traces of people on foot. The hard earth showed no tracks and there were grass stalks askew everywhere. We wasted a day wandering about because we secretly hoped that they would come back. That did not happen. When darkness fell a great and horrible realization came upon us. We went to sleep in silence and rose the next morning in silence and set off walking at a reasonable pace. I must add that my sedan chair, the only one of three brought along from the city that was still in use, had been left behind. Without implements we could not chop it up for firewood and the useless object remained beside the ashes of the little fire for which we had gathered together the skeletons of brushwood, all in deathly silence.
We took our direction from the sun, but were forced by the course of rivers to diverge from it. Without slaves to carry us through the water we were helpless. We had no waterbags. We lived on the veld foods that quite by chance I had learned to pick out by keeping an eye on the bearers. It was hard work. I did my best, but we fo
und barely enough to keep body and soul together. In our time of testing in this place of desolation we nevertheless felt of good heart and tender towards each other. But the terrific grandeur of the nights left us dejected.
One day, seeing vultures, we limped along to where they were circling. A revolting stench struck our nostrils. I knew we both had the same thought, but the stench was much too awful. Furthermore the vultures did not give way to us. They hobbled about the rib cage, presumably that of a wildebeest, and pecked each other. They ate greedily as if we, just outside their circle, did not exist at all.
We walked many days. The veld did not change. Sometimes we talked. I expressed my surprise at the eldest son.
They would kill him, take his money, and seek their freedom in the city in the desert – that was the stranger’s opinion.
To this day I do not understand the eldest son’s behavior, this foremost heir of the coastal city’s most prosperous merchant who, because of his father’s influence and power, had been given nothing but the best since childhood, nothing but the finest that civilization could offer, and who had become an eccentric, short-tempered dreamer and fantasizer who had taken out his bad temper on the helpless yet could also dispense alms lavishly. The last time I had seen this happen was on the outskirts of the city on the day of our departure. He took a handful of money out of his leather bag and hurled it from the raised level of his sedan chair at the leprous beggar sitting at the side of the road, without looking at the fellow. Some of the coins struck the man in his tense face. There was nothing for him to do but duck and then creep around after the money on all fours, since his feet were already too blunt to walk; and with hands deformed into dried-out mopani worms, as brown too, as grey and black, he tried to pick up the coins. To maneuver them up.
Rocking from side to side I disappeared around a corner. I think that outcast was the last city dweller on whom my gaze fell. Why don’t the creatures drown themselves? They just keep rotting till they return to the earth. It made me feel sick. More than once we came upon suicides in the woods. We saw pairs of feet, some bare, some still shod in rough sandals, turning around at eye height or hanging motionless, and among the branches glimpsed the contorted faces of old women who looked as if they were hurling abuse at us. Outcasts too. Childless women, or women convicted of witchcraft and shunned because they could not prove they had not let loose the mysterious deaths among the cattle and caused the bad harvests.
Of course I often wonder how long a person keeps on till. Surely there must bea boundary somewhere that becomes clearer and clearer to you, towards which you then reach as towards the greyness of sleep and thence towards the grey dream in which, as in a smaller death, you meet good and evil, the inseparable pair, the twins who defy death.
My dreams fill me and help me eat time. It no longer matters to me that I cannot neatly dispose of time and store it away and preferably forget it; for now I perceive that dreaming and waking do not damn each other, but are extensions of each other and flow into each other, enrich each other, supplement each other, make each other bearable, and that my baobab is a dream come true, and when I see the little people I know they are dream figures that really hunt and really provide me with food and that they really see me but also do not see me because I exist in their dream, and they feed their dream by caring for me. We meet each other and know nothing of each other. We go our ways separately and depend on each other, they on me in that I am as I am, and I on them in that they act as they act.
Nowadays I laugh ruefully at my spasmodic attempts to use the black and green beads I picked up to measure what is so ridiculous to measure and record. I attribute it to my education, random but education nevertheless, in which division and counting and classification played such an important role as to inspire people to undertake a journey that ought to progress so and so, and bring in such and such, and therefore for this and that reason ought to be set about in this way and not another, in this season and not another, in this direction and not another, with this equipment and not that – in which every last factor was taken into account, and when the day of our departure arrived with late-summer laziness, when day slipped into the realm of night and we forgot our sleepiness and our yawns, when for a last time, purely out of habit, we looked at the sea and saw the dhows and the skiffs heaving and the sky begin to burn with colors of fire in the kudu-berry trees, none of us noticed that we were entering a dream. So treacherous are the adventures of sleep.
It is clear that when I have finished drinking this last gift of the little people I will gain entrance to a new kind of dream. The brew is unknown to me but I do not have to know it to know that crocodile brains are the main constituent. Perhaps that is what I have been expecting. Will a dark mumbling wind come and fetch me?
What will I do with the golden nails and the beads, with the near-black water pot and the ostrich eggshell, my possessions? I would like time to reclaim them. The nails were the most useless present. I could do nothing with them, and how to show gratitude for them remained a riddle to me. Here they lie in my palm like seed that might germinate advantageously.
Everything I do is discreetly watched, and even my last gesture, the lifting of the ostrich eggshell to my lips, will be observed and (hopefully, presumably, probably) approved of. I will do it respectfully, slowly and stately in a last vain effort to satisfy demands I do not understand.
But for them I would long ago have starved. I was in a precarious state when the meeting occurred.
Scorching sunshine early-winter, but I remained asleep in the belly of the great tree. I remained asleep from hunger exhaustion, delirious and slowly withering away, with too little strength to change my habitation, to move to better grazing, simply grateful for the roomy hiding place, bare and robbed of its foliage, uncomfortable colossus with its probing fingers. I remained lying half-asleep, half-awake, and did not know if what I heard was really taking place outside or was in my mind, for I became aware of people talking, but as in one’s sleep they talked so that one understood nothing. These phantoms busied themselves around the tree and I wondered whether they would enter my own dream reality and bend over me. I smelled something. I smelled smoke. It frightened me. I was not prepared to believe I would be consumed in the flames of my delirium. Through the crevice I saw floating forms pass, and sat upright on one elbow. Smoke. Human voices. The phantoms carried long branches stripped bare and joined to one another in a rough way to resemble a ladder. I understood nothing of what was going on. Nothing of the events being played out around my dwelling. I saw faces. Through a haze of smoke and incomprehension I saw the ladder being leaned against the smooth trunk, men climbing up it with bouquets of burning twigs, I heard shouts of joy, I saw ghostly people dance, men and women and children, I saw them gorge themselves and lick their lips and heard them laugh, and I stepped out of the baobab, the meager remnants of me, stepped out of the shadow mouth of the opening into the blinding winter light, clad in the tatters of a silk robe, my eyes huge, my lips open, my hands stretched forward in helplessness. I spoke.
Only the next day must one or two of them have returned, for when I came back from my drinking-water stream there was a dry hollowed-out monkey-orange shell filled with honey waiting for me at the crevice opening. Dark brown, almost black honey with the coarseness of bee grub.
How to show thanks? I held the monkey orange in my outstretched hand and stood a short distance from the tree trunk so that I was easily visible. For a while I stood so. The bees in the disturbed nest above buzzed busily, hummed as they tried to repair the damage against the assault of the cold. In the movement of light and shadow it looked as if they were swimming around, falling and rising. Thus I paid tribute to the bees and to their accomplices.
Every day there was something waiting for me. When I went to drink water they came with their gifts and set them down before the opening. Out of curiosity I spied on them one day. I pretended to go into the river undergrowth but did not at once go to the water; I hid in th
e thicket and watched the vicinity of the baobab. I saw two men approach through the long grass. They were short, and the grass made them seem even smaller. They had a light skin color and short hair like lichen spread over the head. They had crude clothing and weapons. First they gazed at the tree, then quickly went nearer, put something down, and scampered off. The long grass swallowed them.
A ground hornbill came up, walking. I saw that he was heading for the baobab opening. I could clearly recognize the calculating look in his light-blue eyes, coquettishly veiled by stiff eyelashes, and I got cross, and before he could get to my present I burst out of my hiding place to chase him away. The next day nothing was brought to me. Only the day after that. Thus I learned to behave according to unknown laws, though I burned with curiosity and would have given anything to learn more.
Particularly welcome were the serviceable hide clothes that they gave me, with an eye to the premonitions of winter which was so much harsher here than the winters I was used to, harsher and drier and more yellow. The earth crumbled and turned to powder. The branches of deciduous trees showed confused silhouettes against a sky become much lighter. And the bauhinia flowers decayed into a frenzy of shooting seeds. Everything seemed to me as if abandoned. The ibis community looked dusty and untidy. Even the elephants looked dismal.
It affected me. Again a somberness came over me. The mischievousness of a mongoose, the water games of an otter failed to cheer me up. The head-wagging rock lizards did not divert me. I slouched aimlessly around.
The Expedition to the Baobab Tree Page 9