He did not let me finish, exclaiming at once: ‘Be reasonable, Laurens, what am I to do in Europe without my cameras?’
Without argument I left it at that, feeling it was best in the worst of circumstances to let the worst be the worst as quickly as possible. Often in my life I have found that the one thing that can save is the thing which appears most to threaten. In peace and war I have found that frequently, naked and unashamed, one has to go down into what one most fears and in that process, from somewhere beyond all conscious expectation, comes a saving flicker of light and energy that even if it does not produce the courage of a hero at any rate enables a trembling mortal to take one step further.
‘All right, Eugene,’ I said again; ‘I’ll leave at dawn and you all can follow at leisure later in the day.’
He was calm again at once. Almost like a child he asked: ‘Would you please reserve a nice room in the hotel at Muhembo for me?’
If anything more was needed to illustrate to me how much Spode had lived in the midst of a world of his own feelings and rejected the formidable reality of Africa through which we had moved so laboriously for so long, it was that final request of his.
‘There are no hotels in Muhembo,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to camp out there, as here, until a plane turns up.’
I took it as a good sign that, with illusion gone and faced with the worst, I slept better that night than any other on the journey. I slept so soundly that a leopard, judging by his spoor, passed close enough to my net to brush it with his tail on his way to kill some of the ferrymen’s chickens in the tree next to me. At dawn I shaved, sluiced myself down with cold water by the river, put on clean clothes, ate quickly, and set out for Muhembo. I must add that when I had gone Spode, for only the second time on the journey, produced his violin and played gaily, vigorously, and at length to the camp.
CHAPTER 8
The Spirits of the Slippery Hills
BY chance (to use the only phrase we have for describing one of the most significant manifestations of life) that very morning a plane with only half a load was ordered to change its schedule at the last minute and to fly to Muhembo to fill up with recruits for the mines. I would have missed it had I hesitated and stayed on at ‘The Place of the Eddies’ to try and over-persuade Spode, for I arrived just as the two Europeans in charge of the depot were setting out for the airfield. Their generous and experienced hearts at once sized up the extent of my predicament. There was no filling in of forms in triplicate, no demanding of a fortnight’s notice in writing, no referring to some remote impersonal authority for a decision, or any other of the devices used by our timid collective age to eliminate the individual equation in life. The senior of the officials merely said: ‘Come on, there’s no time like the present.’ No platitude to me has ever sounded more profound and original.
They raced me to the airfield where they introduced me to the pilot of the aircraft who turned out to be Captain of their fleet. He wore a D.S.O. and D.F.C. on his neat tunic at the head of several rows of war-ribbons, and like so many good fighter pilots had the gift of imagination stressed strongly in the lines of his face, with an expression intimating that he was not yet reconciled to his undemanding peacetime role after such prolonged preoccupation with matters of life and death.
‘Don’t worry!’ they called after me as I followed him aboard. ‘We’ll see to Spode and do our best to entertain your chaps. Good luck to you.’
Soon I was sitting behind the pilot in the cockpit peering far below where a haze of smoke and heat drifted over the waters of the swamp which glared back at me like a polished brass. I spent the night in Francistown in the house of Cyril and Molly Challis. They promised to meet Spode when he came through and to help him on his way. I left them at dawn with the same pilot on his way to Northern Nyasaland, and was put down at Bulawayo for breakfast. I could hardly believe my good fortune when I arrived in Johannesburg the same afternoon by regular mail plane only thirty-six hours after leaving ‘The Place of the Eddies’ which it had taken me so many long weeks to reach by land.
I went straight to my customary hotel and booked a room. I was just settling in when the telephone rang.
‘A call from London,’ said the operator.
‘For me?’ I was dumbfounded for I had been unable to keep regularly in touch with anyone for weeks.
In a moment I heard my wife’s clear voice speaking from London, six thousand miles away.
‘But how did you know I was here?’ I asked, too amazed to listen to her questions.
‘I had a feeling directly I woke up,’ she replied, ‘and booked a call through . . . . What’s happened?’
I told her. To my growing amazement she was not dismayed. ‘You’ll really be able to get going now,’ she said. ‘I’m convinced of it. And I’m sure you’ll find another cameraman. . . . Sure of it! Everything’ll be all right now. Good luck, darling.’
The three minutes was up.
This incident had a great effect for the good on a person like myself to whom coincidences have never seemed idle but always to hold something purposeful. I put down the receiver so profoundly reassured that I began at once to make a long series of calls on friends and acquaintances. One of them said: ‘I know a man who might help. I’ll ask him to lunch with us tomorrow.’
So from friend to friend of friend, I began to track down a suitable substitute for Spode. On the third day, just when it seemed to me I would have to go to Europe in order to do so, the trail led me to Duncan Abraham. The son of a Scottish Minister, born in Zululand with not a silver spoon but a Box-Brownie in his mouth, as I once teased him, he had been obsessed by cameras all his life, and as soon as he was of age had set up as a commercial photographer. He had served as a cameraman with the film unit of the South African forces in the war and when peace came established himself as a free-lance in Johannesburg where he represented several international film news agencies and even from time to time made his own documentaries. He was so absorbed in his work that it rewarded him with the sense of a personal meaning in life. When he worked he had no mind for anything except his subject. Once when filming off the Natal Coast Duncan had stepped backwards over the gunwale of his boat and fallen, camera and all, into the Indian Ocean. Duncan returned to the scene the next day with a professional diving unit. Guided by little more than love of his lost instrument, he selected a place in the heaving waters for diving and at last retrieved from the deep the camera which he still had in use when I met him. From the way his shrewd Scot’s eye kindled at my proposition I knew his answer. But there were difficulties, he pointed out at once, which it would be expensive to overcome. He was busy making an historical film of missionary effort in Africa, and also had important national events to cover for his news agencies. Everything turned on whether he could get permission to suspend the former and find substitutes to film the latter. In the end, for a steep consideration, we managed to do both. Unbelievable as it seems, Duncan’s favourite working camera was of the same make as Spode’s. At that moment in the whole of the vast city there was no other of that type!
I left Duncan to follow me within a few days and set out for Muhembo as fast as I could. I had complete confidence in Vyan and Ben, but I knew also how suspense and the general sense of failure and misfortune inflicted on us by Spode’s disaffection would loom large in the heat, dust, and isolation of such a remote little place. Also I could not fail to notice that already it was spring. When I first started out from Johannesburg with my Land-Rovers it had still been winter. Now the first delicate increase of the year, and young flowers wet with dew, were on sale in the streets. I had little time to spare: but just enough to allow me to stop at an open stall on the way to the airfield. I bought strawberries and young asparagus and wherever I landed on my way back left some with the people who had helped me and were still making do on their hard winter’s rations. One marooned wife, who years before had confided in me a craving for English strawberries, burst into tears when I put a basket of the fru
it in her hands.
I arrived back at Muhembo on an afternoon of increased and searing heat just a week after leaving ‘The Place of the Eddies’. I was fearful of what I might find but knowing Vyan and Ben as I did I should not have been anxious. In meticulous khaki they were all there, with a shining Land-Rover, to meet me. Only Comfort, whom I was to miss greatly, had been recalled to his far northern post. We drove back, all talking at once, to a model camp pitched in the shade of a great tree on the wide Okovango’s bank, and so light, gay, and natural was the atmosphere that I could hardly believe my senses.
Some days later Duncan Abraham joined us. He was in camp no longer than it took to eat a quick meal when he loaded the magazines of his camera and began filming the birds coming out of the swamp like giant puffs of smoke; the noses, nostrils, ears, and eyes of the hippo hypnotic on the bright afternoon water; the Mambakush women going down to the river with jars shaped like Greek vases on their heads; and a hundred and one other colourful things. This eruption of activity in a department for so long dormant caught everyone’s attention, and when Duncan suddenly clambered up a tree like a monkey to get a better angle on the river my companions all exchanged astonished glances. Jeremiah, laughing so much that he could hardly find breath, exclaimed: ‘I tell you, Jambo, I tell you, John, that new man is a very, very clever person!’
When the normal light began to fail Duncan was still filming the sunset colours. In the morning, before I could give him coffee, he was back on the river bank waiting to film the dawn and sunrise over the smoking swamp. He was not a talkative person for his thought, it seemed, was shaped not in words but in endless sequences of camera shots. I heard Vyan say jokingly to Ben at breakfast: ‘Our trouble has been reversed! Before we couldn’t get the filming to begin! Now it’ll never stop!’
We stayed in Muhembo only long enough to repair something of the damage done by our failure to film more of the journey into the swamps. There was no time and no point in attempting to retrace our way back into the marshes. The evidence clearly showed that the River Bushman, as a coherent entity, had vanished from the Okovango Delta. The tsetse fly and sleeping sickness, the invasion of more powerful and consciously assertive hordes of Bantu fugitives had caused him to disperse, and either to die or be absorbed into the taller peoples crowding his shrinking frontiers. What was left were merely pitiful fragments and one of our last tasks at Muhembo was to make an excursion into the swamp nearby where Ben and Vyan in my absence had located a party of three River Bushmen, a man, his wife, and a kinsman.
The woman was very beautiful but with a haunted face. She had an expression of a total defeat in her eyes as if the end of her whole race was focused in her own person. I always felt it was no accident that she was childless. She camped with her husband under a tree on a mound by the side of a long narrow backwater where her men-folk had built an intricate and beautifully woven trap of golden reeds and rushes across a sky-blue channel. The trap had two entrances against either bank, sealed with long funnelled baskets, and on the five separate occasions during which they cleared them for Duncan to film, we noticed that the mob of barbel and mudfish were always in the same basket and the aristocratic Okovango bream in the other, ‘preserving a nice class distinction to the rim of the frying-pan’, as Vyan put it.
I tried to get the two Bushmen to talk about their past but I did not devote overmuch time to it for I doubted if they had anything new to add. They had been so cut off from birth, and their spirit so deeply concussed by the headlong fall of their whole race into disaster, that I felt there was only an overall ache to communicate. I did persuade the woman to come into camp so that I could doctor a festering injury to her hand. Duncan took a photograph of her then, her lovely ghost face warming at the gift of a coloured kerchief. It was like the glow of some inherited memory, as if she could still remember what such a present could have meant to a woman like herself before life closed its doors on her and her people at both ends of its narrow corridor. However, we did film the little round of their circumscribed living in the teeming swamp, and extracted some conversation on the magnetic tape on our Ferrograph recording machine. The man, when he listened to a record of such talk played back by Charles, instinctively spoke up again where our original questions to him resounded on the tape, and endeared himself to everyone by being the first to laugh at himself when he quickly discovered his error. These, however, were the only glimpses we were allowed into their nature, for quickly the prevailing sadness would settle like a mist on the blue of an autumn evening between them and us. The husband, indeed, who was a good bit older than the other two, steadfastly declined to leave the swamp. The last I saw of him was at his fishing trap in his flat-bottomed makorro, leaning heavily on his punting pole and looking, not at our receding craft, but deeply into the water as if his spirit had need of concentration on the one element that endured unchanging in his world, into which angry men had come so thick and fast upon one another’s heels to cut down, one by one, the branches of a race that it had taken many thousands of years of secluded life to grow.
That evening we sent the woman and her kinsman home to the swamp loaded with presents, and I told my companions to prepare to leave in the morning. Duncan pleaded for two more days saying there was still so much of interest to film. But I remembered the warning Samutchoso had delivered solemnly in the swamp: I would have to hasten if I wanted to see a gathering of Bushmen in the Slippery Hills. They would stay there only so long as the water in the crevices at the foot of the hills lasted, for they drew on the eternal sacred water at the top of the hills not as a routine but only in dire necessity. Already twelve days had passed since I promised to meet Samutchoso at ‘The Place of the Eddies’ to guide us to the hills. Every day had added to the power and the glory of the sun. All around us the white waters were shrinking and even the great river falling fast, while my own spirit stamped like a horse kept over-long in the stable. Firmly I refused Duncan.
We sat under our great communal net in Muhembo for the last time because once in the desert, though it had its own formidable insects, there would be no mosquitoes. We talked until late to the two Europeans to whom we owed so much, and during the pauses listened to the unique sounds of the swamp. Yet we were all up early, delayed only slightly because Duncan could not be torn from a last effort to film a dawn he declared to be the greatest of all. By noon we were back at ‘The Place of the Eddies’. But Samutchoso was not there. After waiting patiently for us he had returned to his home in the swamps. While the others settled down to prepare lunch in the shade I borrowed a guide from the ferryman’s family to conduct me to Samutchoso’s home along the ridges of sand that were rising daily higher above the water. I found him some hours later surrounded by his women and children, all naked except for tight loin cloths round their stomachs and fishing with long baskets in a fiery lagoon just below the reed walls of the courtyard round Samutchoso’s neat thatched hut. The setting, the shining hour, the leisurely occupation, and the manner in which swamp, earth, and the empty sky combined to make an impersonal law for all, reminded me vividly of the Old Testament. The impression was increased by Samutchoso’s manner. The moment he saw me he waded out of the water to greet me as if I had not kept him waiting a fortnight. He asked no questions, but merely said that if I could please help him with one thing he would be ready to come with me at once. He led me into the courtyard of his home. There, full in the sun on a reed mat, lay a young emaciated boy shivering violently.
‘Please make him well, Master!’ Samutchoso pleaded.
I was back in a world before drugs and patent medicines existed and when healing was achieved by faith. I had no certain idea what the boy’s illness was. I listened carefully to his breathing with my ear on his hot trembling chest and instinctively chose aureo-mycin from my medicines, getting Samutchoso to explain to a wide-eyed family who had gathered around, how to continue the treatment. I was to find later that the boy recovered. That incident over, Samutchoso went into a hut and emerged
almost at once with a stick and a small bundle in hand. He spoke a few words to the women and children and again there were no explanations, questions, or protests. On the faces of all was an expression of the acceptance of people accustomed to converting chance and change into the currency of fate.
That evening for the first time after many weeks, we slept again in the bush and on the deep sand of the Kalahari. The flute-like sound of the swamps had gone and in its place arose a variety of voices: night plover, screech owl, jackal, hyaena, and finally towards morning the greatest of them all, the solemn roar of a lion echoing between us and the hills.
We set off again on a cloudless morning. Ben and Vyan went ahead with two Land-Rovers to break a way through the bush: Charles, Duncan, Samutchoso, and I followed at leisure in order to be free to stop and film undisturbed.
We were trying to stalk a dazzle of zebra which flashed in and out of a long strip of green and yellow fever trees, with an ostrich, its feathers flared like a ballet skirt around its dancing legs, on their flank, when suddenly two shots, fired quickly one after the other, snapped the tense silence ahead.
My blood went cold within me. Instinctively I looked at Samutchoso. His face was without expression and yet I knew he had heard and that a change accordingly had taken place within him. With an acute sense of guilt, I realized I had forgotten to keep faith with him. My anxieties in the swamp, my absorption with the problem of Spode, the long journey out and back from Johannesburg, and many other things had overlaid the moment when he and I had first discussed the journey to the hills. I had completely overlooked the essential condition of the promise extracted by him from me: that there should be no killing on our way to the hills. I had forgotten to tell our companions of Samutchoso’s account of the spirits’ law against killing on approach to their home.
The Lost World of the Kalahari Page 19