The Triangle and The Mountain: A Bermuda Triangle Adventure

by Jake von Alpen

  Grant had called up a radar screen at the navigation station and kept a casual watch while they were eating below in the saloon. “Do you understand this?” he asked, pointing to the screen.

  “No,” she said.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d take over the watch now,” he said. “All you need to do is to sit outside in the cockpit and keep a lookout. However,” he continued, “you need to call me when the following happens: If you see a ship anywhere, to the front or the back, left or right. If the wind changes and the sails start flapping and don’t fill up again, you call me as well. I am going to sleep now but I will relieve you in four hours.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all. Just sit there and keep your eyes open. Don’t touch anything. Don’t press any buttons or levers and don’t try to steer. Everything is set as it should be. The autopilot will take care of everything.”

  He accompanied his crew on deck and took a last look around before heading for the companionway. Five minutes later he had occasion to shout. Madeleine rushed below and found him in his office.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “It’s Tencent,” he said, “Tencent dropped by twenty percent.”

  “Really? Which ten cents are you talking about? Are you OK? Weren’t you going to bed?”

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “What were you shouting about then?” Madeleine looked at him quizzically. The bleary-eyed, unshaven yachtsman looked rather incongruous in front the polished desk with three oversized monitors arranged around it.

  “I shorted Tencent. Tencent is not change in your pocket. It is a massive internet service provider in China, one of the biggest in the world. I put in a short two weeks back and a few hours ago the stock fell by twenty percent.”

  “Which means what?”

  “It means that I have just made a ton of money.”

  “Really? How much?”

  “Five hundred and thirty two thousand US dollars.”

  “Whow! That’s not bad at all! So what do we do now? Are we celebrating? I saw the champagne bottles.”

  “No, not now. Later. Now I want to sleep.”

  Madeleine was still intrigued. “How can you sleep? You don’t make this kind of money every day, or do you?”

  “Not every day,” he laughed. “But regularly. At least once every two months.”

  “It’s still good,” she said. “How do you do that so regularly?”

  “I’m a trader with my own secret recipe,” he said.

  “It sounds interesting. It last I know where your money comes from. What do you trade in?”

  “I trade in shares, commodities, indexes, currencies - the works.”

  “Where?”

  “On all the major stock exchanges of the world.”

  “But aren’t you on holiday now?”

  “Not at all. This is my office. The only one I have. From here I trade anywhere I like.”

  “Congratulations! You appear to be very good at what you are doing.”

  “I’m the best. In my country there’s nobody who comes even close.”

  “So what do you do with all your money?”

  “I’m getting myself an entire farm on a mountain not far from Cape Town. Up there I’m going to build a castle from where I can look down on everybody else.”

  ***

  On the hot side several layers of ancient sea beds clung to the basalt core of the mountain. Remarkably, every layer was still perfectly horizontal, even after six million years. The two KhoiKhoi sorcerers scrambled downwards over the old sea beds, which were now crumbling sandstone terraces. Soon they disappeared into a dense growth of what the Dutch – and the KhoiKhoi nowadays - called Sugar Bush. In winter these bushes sported masses of conical flowers, ranging in colour from dark red to shocking white. All of these flowers produced copious amounts of sweet nectar, which excited the sunbirds and the bees and attracted even larger animals such as baboons. In fact, in the flowering time the four troops of baboons that called the mountain home practically camped in these bushes, hunting scorpions for protein and drinking nectar for energy. In addition, it has never been beyond the human inhabitants of the land, past and present, to bend over a freshly opened cone, thereby allowing the nectar to flow directly into the mouth. Both KhoiKhoi had done this before. Both of them knew the alcoholic brew that the KhoiKhoi wives concocted from it. Now, in summer, however, the cones were dry and hard and all that was to be had from the dense growth that reached to twice their height, was shelter.

  They talked about the runaways.

  “How far do you think they will go?” asked Hadah.

  “I think they will reach the Great Mountains tonight,” said the master. “Most probably they will rest there and that will be a mistake. The Dutch know that you can get through at that break.”

  “That means sometime tomorrow they will be there with horses.”

  “If they are clever they will go there even now and wait for them. It’s the only place where these slaves can get through.”

  “If they escape do you think they will reach their people?”

  “Many of them run away but I wonder if any ever get back to their own people. It is very far. You may start off as a young man but be home when you are old. Also, I have seen that these slaves have no knowledge of living off the land. They get a fright when they hear a bird make a noise in the bushes. Most of them never try to go far. They just live around here, mostly in caves near the coast where they eat shellfish like our people.”

  “So they have no chance?

  “They have a chance but they must learn from our people and also from the Sonqua.”

  “The Sonqua will kill them with their poisoned arrows.”

  “Only if they interfere with their women. The Sonqua may make slaves out of them, though. So will our people. You must be able to rely on yourself and for that you need knowledge.”

  The apprentice nodded. He was also trying to acquire knowledge. He wondered if the slaves were going to overcome the temptation of the dark cave that they will pass at the foot of the vertical face of the next peak, the biggest in the range. Maybe they will feel the shudder that he experienced when he was there for the first time and maybe then they will realise that it would be prudent to act on the advice of the master to pass it by. Even the baboons stayed away from that place.

  He wondered if they would recognise anything, being so stupid. When they saw the slab of rock to the right of the entrance, would they guess what it was used for? What would they make of the leather thongs with loops at their ends that hung from the boughs of the ancient fire scarred tree behind the rock? Would they somehow know that those thongs were meant to hold the feet of infants while blood dripped from their sliced throats into receptacles on the rock and their lives seeped away, only to be absorbed by the spirit living in the mountain?

  It was his master’s and his place of work. It was important that nothing should be disturbed.

  If they moved on he wondered if they would speculate about the peculiar shapes in the scree below the cliff face, about the fact that the rocks were organised in mounds. He once asked the master how many there were.

  “If a man lived to a very old age there would be a mound here for every day of his life,” was his answer. “The first custodian of the mountain was buried here,” and he indicated a spot very close to the cave. “From here on the others were buried further and further away. It is important not to disturb the graves of those who went before us.”

  On the day that he explained this they walked along the footpath that tracked the cliff-face. One of the big black eagles that circled the mountain in search of careless rock hyraxes passed them at eye level and it had returned by the time they reached a mound at which the master stopped.

  “This is the grave of my predecessor, Aitsi-!uma. “See here. This is where you bring my body and if not my body, then my bones.” It was prescient of him to talk about the bones because years later Ha
dah was to open a grave in the night and walk many days with a set of bones on his back, so they could get to the place that the master had indicated.

  “On this mountain,” continued the master, “we do not hunt. We do not kill any animal here, especially not near any of these graves.”

  All the KhoiKhoi of the land knew that this was a special place. They did not talk about it much. It was associated with tears and grief at times and the kind of dark fear you had of unknown things that moved about in the night. They all knew that yes, you could graze your sheep and your cattle on the sweet red grass that sprouted thick in the years after a fire on the slopes of the mountain. But for hunting you stuck to the bottom of the valleys. You kept your distance.

  The master told the story of the Dutch boy whose father had established a farm on the outskirts of the new settlement called Stellenbosch. The boy liked to ride and hunt. One day he travelled further than usual. What attracted him, nobody knew. Maybe he saw a few of the last eland that was left in the area. Maybe it was something else. At any rate, he rode his horse as close to the mountain as he could get. When he reached the beginning of the wide field of scree he tethered the horse and continued on foot over the rocks. He got off one shot only. That is what they said when they examined his musket where he died. They found the body after only two days of searching. First they spotted the horse at the top end of the grassy valley and after an hour of search they found the body. Miraculously the wild animals had not eaten the body yet. What puzzled them even more, was that there was no obvious reason why the boy should have died. The master visited the farm shortly afterwards and heard it all from the KhoiKhoi who helped to track down the horse and the boy.

  The farmer had a physician come from town to examine the boy but even he could not figure it out. The master chuckled with merriment when he came to this point. The first thing that the doctor commented on was that there was no gunshot wound that indicated a hunting accident. Then he examined him for a broken neck that would indicate a fall with instantaneous death as a result. His neck was fine. Perhaps he had fallen and broken something else, but no, everything was still whole. He had not broken a leg and lay there waiting for help, only to die from exposure and thirst. He examined the body carefully for snakebite. The mountain was full of puff adders. Since this became the only plausible explanation the doctor spent a whole hour trying to find the location of the snake bite, or for that matter a sting from a scorpion or a spider bite but eventually declared himself as dumbfounded as everybody else.

  “Perhaps it was a very small snake,” he offered lamely.

  They buried him on a small hill, in full sight of hot side of the mountain and the place where he died. Around his grave they built man high walls which they whitewashed. His burial spot was the first in the family graveyard.

  “You can see it from here,” said the master, pointing through a gap in the foliage. “It is the white spot not too far from that farmer’s house. Do you see it? When I passed there I saw that they had planted some small trees inside. Already the silly slaves say they had seen the ghost of the young man.”

  Hidden by the sugar bushes, master and apprentice carefully cleared an area for themselves. They gathered up dried sticks for a fire later on. Then they built a makeshift fireplace with rocks. It would keep the coals from blowing about. Under the bushes there was almost no wind but you never knew. The weather could change quickly and the mountain was dry.

  “Do you know why there are so many of these bushes nowadays on the mountain?” asked the master once they were done.

  “No.”

  “It’s because nobody is burning any more. In the old days when our people lived in this land we used to burn the veld. Then you go away and come back in the fourth winter for the new grass. The Dutch don’t understand about burning. That’s why you have bushes everywhere and the grazing gets less and less. And because they don’t move the animals around,” said the old man, “the mountainsides around their homes are criss-crossed with footpaths, killing the grass even more.”

  They both took swigs of water from their gourds while they contemplated how the world had changed.

  Their idle ruminations were interrupted by a boom, followed by another. They jumped up and hurried to the nearest clearing. There they settled down to watch the spectacle. There was a new arrival in Table Bay. A ship moved as gracefully as a large water bird past Robben Island. It lightened sail, slowed down and eventually stopped.

  “There is another one,” said Hadah.

  Indeed there was. The KhoiKhoi were now tired of sitting up, so they lay back and watched the second ship through the open Vs of their legs. The ship followed the course of the first one and they watched it until it lost its sails as well. They knew what was coming next. They had to wait two hours for it. A cannon on the fort issued a series of booms. A few minutes later that same series was taken up by other cannons closer to them. They listened as the message was taken up by cannons far away on the West Coast, repeated a third time, then a fourth time, so faint that it was nothing more than a whisper.

  “What did the message say?” asked Hadah.

  “I don’t know exactly,” said the master, “but I’ve heard the code for cattle and the one for vegetables.”

  “Now the farmers will harvest overnight and set off early in the morning for the market.”

  “Exactly,” said the master.

  “Perhaps the people chasing the runaway slaves will turn around because they have something better to do.”

  “Perhaps, but let’s not take a chance. We’ll stay here for the night.”

  “What do you think they are doing there?” asked Hadah, pointing to a spot at the foot of the mountain, closer than any other farmstead.

  “I’ve been watching this all the time that we were sitting here and the more I look at it the more I think they are building a house.”

  “A new farm!”

  “It certainly looks like it.”

  “What are we going to do? It’s so close!”

  “You sound like Aitsi-!uma. Do know what she did when people started traveling from Stellenbosch to the cool side of this mountain?”

  “No, you have not told me that story yet.”

  “All right. This is what she did. She was so indignant that the Dutch came close to this mountain that she mixed some of our potions and pronounced a curse on all travellers on that road. The next time a party of Dutch travelled along the road they all sunk into the mud. The horses could not move because they were down to their bellies and the wagons were down to their axles. It took them days to get it all out. Even now there are some wheels in the ground that they could not recover.”

  “Haha,” laughed Hadah. “I would have liked to see it.”

  “She laughed as well, so much that she fell over. We were standing on the edge of the mountain, watching it all. But I’m thinking about something,” said the master, now serious. “We can just as well take advantage of the changes. If a new farm comes there, it might be a good idea for us to offer our services to the farmer as herders. That way we can eat, herd the livestock up here and do our work at the same time. Perhaps we should find out what kind of a person he is.”

  Hadah understood the master’s thinking. The days when the custodians of the mountain lived in abundance seemed to be over. Their people lived further and further away and even worse, those who stayed behind were allowing themselves more and more to be influenced by the ways of the Dutch. Being a custodian had become hard living. It was time to adapt. Herding was not new to him or to the master. They both had been doing herding jobs on and off. The Dutch deemed the KhoiKhoi to be too small in stature to do the hard work on the fields but they liked them as herders. The more he thought about it the more the idea appealed to him.

  When night fell they lit the fire using the flint from the master’s bag.

  “If there is one good thing that came with the Dutch,” said the master, not for the first time, “it was flint.”

&nb
sp; The sparks fell into the ball of dried grass and Hadah blew it into a flame. He stuffed it into the pyramid of sticks and the dried wood lit up instantly. It took only a few seconds to skin the rabbit. It was already smelling but they did not care. The meat was softer that way anyway. Since they left their cooking pot behind, they forced a sharpened stick through it length wise and set the rabbit up over the coals with rocks as support on either side. Carefully they turned and turned on the ends of the stick to get the meat just right. A rabbit did not have much meat and they did not want to burn it. To neutralise the gaminess they used the ashes from the fire for seasoning and had the rabbit with the tubers that they baked in the soil under the fire. The whole tasted excellently and the bones which they threw into the darkness of the bushes around them were licked clean.

  Later that night Hadah woke up as a rabbit bone snapped in powerful jaws. He immediately knew that it was a long-haired brown hyena. They shared their mountain redoubt with a few solitary leopards and several families of brown hyenas, the last of the predators. He listened to the crunching noises as the bone got reduced to grist and heard the animal sniff as it looked for more. When it moved up-wind he could smell it too. He looked over at the dark form of the master. The old man snored so loud that they might just as well have kept the fire going. One could probably hear him halfway down the mountain. He woke up for the occasional pee, otherwise nothing could disturb his sleep.

  It is not that he was scared of the hyena. Neither of them were scared of the leopards or the hyenas. The animals were clever enough not to attack humans but hyenas were known to run off with the karos of soft buck hide. He held it tighter around his body and felt for his fighting stick, just in case there was going to be a tug-of-war.

  In truth he felt a kinship with the hyenas. They knew each other from sight but also, they were in the same business. Every night the hyenas slipped into the surrounding valleys searching for a stray, sick or infirm animal, be it wild antelope or domestic. And they, his master and he, were doing exactly the same. They performed a service to humanity by weeding out the weak, be it a malformed baby or the smaller sibling where a mother gave birth to twins or triplets. They had a calling – it was to be the hyenas of humankind.