by James Whyle
The heathen left three gaunt women and two small children behind and one of the women had a baby tied to her back. The irregulars paused there and the kid sat and watched the prisoners. The mother untied the knot in the front of her ragged blanket and swung the baby forward and inserted the nipple of her left breast into its mouth. The infant sucked at the shrivelled dug. There was a crust of mucus on its lip and flies buzzed about its dark staring eyes and it did not blink when they landed.
The irregulars descended into the ravine by a path so steep that they were in danger of following the rocks they dislodged and bouncing down with them to the valley floor. The ammunition and pack horses slid on their hindquarters and the rocket party fought with restraining ropes to stop their apparatus from falling forward onto their horses’ necks.
At the foot of the path they connected with the other forces to enclose a section of the ravine and the area was scoured. The marauder circle closed like a net and the heathen warriors dispersed singly or in pairs and as the long lines passed over them they rose from their hiding places and disappeared behind their pursuers by little-used paths.
The irregulars came upon further women and children, as many as seventy, hidden in the clefts in the base of the cliffs and took them, along with quantities of spears and guns and ornaments. They returned with their prisoners to rejoin Colonel Ire and found him halted at the edge of the forest. There were six fine trees there which stood at the entrance to a track into the bush and from the lower branches of five of them hung five Hottentot defectors. They turned slowly on their ropes as if to avert their gaze from another who was seated on a horse below the sixth tree with his noose about his neck. He lifted his hand and grasped the rope above and tugged at it.
De kabel is te lank, he said.
A Fingo remonstrated with him and others laughed but the Hottentot was grim and obdurate.
De kabel is te lank.
What’s that mean, said the kid.
Rope’s too long, said the joiner.
The Fingo remonstrated further, but another climbed the tree and shortened the rope and when he had descended the Hottentot dug his heels into the horse’s flanks and clicked it forward. The horse started away and the defector dropped and jerked and danced on the rope and a wetness spread in the groin of his threadbare trousers.
The irregulars rested for two hours with Colonel Ire’s forces and about them the valley filled with the smoke of burning huts. They left their warnings turning slowly in the haze as if under orders to take in all points of the compass impartially and they proceeded east towards the head of the valley. A party detached to the left to attack a small body of heathen on a height which commanded the intended ascent and another to the south scarps to intercept the flight of any dislodged groups in that direction.
They trudged up a pass to the northern plateau and found Highlanders posted on the summit to cover their ascent. They marched east and entered the forest below Mount Misery and the trees on the path to the Kromme were all decorated with corpses, the heads bent askew from the neck in strange attitudes and the bodies like gravid puppets hanging from their ropes. They marched through an avenue of death a mile long and then they came upon members of the 60th Rifles who cheered them and who offered the officers cigars and brandy as they passed. The sun went down and they marched for a short while in the darkness and they bivouacked on a bleak rocky ridge where the Captain broke all the pegs of his patrol tent before he gave up and slept on the bare ground.
At daylight they were amarch again and they separated into four bodies and descended via gorges into the Great Ravine. Above them a party occupied the spur they had cleared the day before and threw rockets down into inaccessible retreats.
They gained the floor of the ravine without opposition and proceeded to some entrenched fieldworks thrown up on a farm where they halted for breakfast. They marched east up the valley again through areas fragrant with flowering plants and bushes and boerboon covered with thick clusters of crimson blossom. They passed next to a rocky stream and the trees that lined it were alive with little apes that chattered and leapt from branch to branch.
They joined again with Colonel Ire’s forces and moved up the Great Ravine in a long line of redcoats and riflemen and Highlanders and artillery and Fingos and heathen prisoners. Colonel Ire’s column branched right and the Fingos were ordered to scour the bush. There were strange noises heard in the forest and the Fingos were hesitant to enter and Colonel Ire rode his horse at them and whipped them with a thick short leather lash and drove them before him into the trees.
Firing began at once and the irregulars traced the Fingos’ progress by the wreaths of smoke that curled above the trees. At the head of a subsidiary gorge the Fingos emerged driving two score of heathen women and children and a few sore-backed horses. The women wore black cloaks of finely dressed hide which had been stained with the juice of mimosa bark. Their dense coiled hair was entwined with the tooth and claw of wild beasts and their arms and legs were so thin that they looked more like bones dyed brown than human limbs.
The irregulars moved back down toward the valley floor with the prisoners going before. A woman struggled to keep pace and the Captain came round a corner of the path to hear a close report and his horse stumbled as the woman fell dead before it. A Fingo turned away with a smoking firelock. Another woman struggled under the burden of a child on her back and she discarded it and walked on. The Captain picked up the infant and gave it to a Fingo warrior who carried it held by the ankles over his shoulder like a dead rabbit and its head knocked against the stock of his firelock.
They came down into the main valley and turned again toward its head and in the evening they gained the Northern Highlands where they prepared for another high bivouac and it began to rain. The men had only a single blanket and that was quickly soaked through and they dozed all night like derelicts about their fires.
The reveille sounded at four o’clock and they stumbled up in great confusion in a searching wind. Two of the women prisoners had died during the night and the discarded infant was missing and the Fingo responsible told Johnny Fingo that it had escaped.
The irregulars moved out with Colonel Ire’s column through sleet that came angling out of a dim grey dawn. A world diffuse and bled of colour and the vivid hues of the landscape replaced with cold. They went west across the highlands and out onto the thin ridge that divided the twin valleys. They proceeded along this eminence in a wind that came direct from mountains iced with snow. To the south on the Kromme they could see artillery dropping shells in unbroken forest in the Southern Twin. The kid noted how the smoke billowed on the ridge and the devastation exploded in verdant green below and the great reports rolled out over the valley.
They descended in single file down a vertiginous track into the Northern Twin and they came to a ruined farm where the almond and peach trees stood like brides in puffed dresses of pink blossom. They halted in this bright place for an hour and then they climbed back to the ridge by a track towards its eastern extremity and they gained the summit and went down the other side. They crossed the Southern Twin at the open mouth of that valley and began to ascend to the ridge on the eastern end of the Kromme Heights. The slope steepened and they advanced by a wooded path so narrow that the whole column had to halt every twenty yards and wait for the front to move on as the bugles sounded the halt and advance from front to rear by companies. They came upon an area of burnt-out heathen fires with places for sentinels to cover the country below and they halted and the Captain stood with Colonel Ire while the men rested.
Fingo, said Colonel Ire, is the heathen word for wanderer. But in fact the heathen are wanderers and sojourners themselves. They are the Jews of this continent. And like the Jews of old they have a tendency to throw up millenarian prophets. Talk a certain language to a heathen and he’ll leap forward to gamble everything on a day of rapture. This prophet of theirs claimed that if roots of Pelargonium were eaten our bullets would turn to water. That was perh
aps his biggest mistake.
In what sense?
His word is persistently demonstrated to be nonsense. One day a prophet will rise among them who has learnt the art of revelatory language combined with an appropriate vagueness. And who knows what they will do then.
Perhaps they will destroy us.
Their only hope is the missionaries. But given the poverty of their awareness it is more likely that they destroy themselves.
The party moved on and the kid heard firing from the vanguard and when he passed up the path there were three heathen bodies that lay beside it and a little beyond them a defector hung from a tree and blood trickled from a hole in his forehead and ran down his face and splashed onto his naked dusty feet. The kid brushed past and the dead man swung slowly in his wake.
They gained the heights and descended again by a path more difficult and precipitous than the last where horses slid thirty yards at a stretch and so they came down again into the Southern Twin. They passed through a smouldering village, a place so hot that they ran through it to avoid baking and they moved on into thick forest and scoured it.
Colonel Ire stood in a clearing with a bugler from each regiment at his side and the company and regimental calls of the different corps rang out and so the Colonel commanded the movements of a thousand hidden men who rooted through the undergrowth like hogs.
In the evening the forces reassembled in the valley and marched east and at sunset they bivouacked for the night on open ground. At six o’clock on the day following they marched in heavy rain for their respective camps and far above them on the forest paths the dead waited on their ropes.
XXVII
A free hand – Blakeway’s farm – The uses of children – Slot-hounds on a trail – A village at night – An unexpected meeting – Terror.
GENERAL CATHCART CONTINUED with his methodical combing of the valleys and the Captain was given an order that freed him from military or civil authority in the discharge of his duties and he fixed his headquarters at Blakeway’s farm below the southeastern extremity of the Kromme Heights. The irregulars moved into the tents of the forces previously occupant and the Captain took a room of the farmhouse and had it roughly re-timbered and thatched.
On the dawn of the third day of their occupation Providence the Fingo brought in two heathen boys who had been found scavenging on the outskirts of the camp. The boys were naked and shivering and they were very thin and Johnny Fingo presented them to the Captain. They stood before him and examined the Adams revolver in his holster with wide eyes.
Ask them what they’ll do for a blanket, said the Captain.
Johnny Fingo spoke with the children and the children spoke with one another and then the elder spoke to Johnny Fingo.
They’ll do anything, said Johnny Fingo.
Where do they come from?
Johnny Fingo asked the question and the children spoke and Johnny Fingo interrogated further and there was much gesture involved in the conversation.
Johnny Fingo pointed north towards the Kromme and the southern-twin valley beyond.
Other side.
The Captain rose and went into his room and came out again with a clean folded military blanket.
If they take us there at night, he said, they’ll get blankets. Like this.
Johnny Fingo conveyed the bargain and the children looked at each other and then they looked up at Johnny Fingo and they nodded.
They’ll take us, said Johnny Fingo.
Yes, said the Captain. I see that.
The children were taken away and given food and Herrid found them two shirts from among the spares appropriated from dead men and the Captain set up his table outside his door and opened his book.
God’s will be done, he wrote, but the task assigned to the white man is a difficult one. It seems to me that sometimes we are more like revengeful pursuers hunting down poor fugitive slaves than men going forth to meet with men and fight out disputed rights in fair play. At one time we appear like legal hangmen in the name of Nature’s undefined laws and, at another, simply murderers.
That evening the irregulars ate before sunset and Evans sharpened his reaping hook. At eight o’clock a sickle moon hung in the sky and they moved out of the camp by its light and marched towards the Kromme and up into its forests by Hartung’s path. They tramped through the place of disembowelment and ambush and fireflies sparkled there intermittently like lights on a Christmas tree and the skulls glowed dimly in the undergrowth.
At ten o’clock they came out onto the escarpment and turned north-east and crossed it and went down into the Southern Twin. The kid marched between Evans and the joiner and not a word passed between them. They came down toward the valley floor and then they turned left into the forest and the heathen boys went before them with the Captain and Johnny Fingo. They moved like slot-hounds on an uncertain trail and they followed a rocky path and left it and wound through the undergrowth to the top of a small rise. They halted there and the children pointed into the darkness. The Captain saw high up to his left a faint glimmering light.
The children tugged at Johnny Fingo’s arm and he spoke with them and turned to the Captain.
They ask for blankets, he said.
They’ll get the blankets when we’re done, said the Captain.
Commands were issued in whispers and they moved up towards the light. They came into a narrow gorge and the Captain saw the dim shapes of five domed huts in a clearing around a small fire. He held up his palm and the dark column halted behind him. He conferred with Lieutenant Bruce and issued whispered orders and the men spread out and crawled to within sixty yards of the homestead. The kid lay with Evans and the joiner behind the cover of the roots of a tree. There was a bullet seated ready in the bore of his rifle and he took the cap from the nipple and blew on it and polished it and replaced it. He thumbed back the hammer and he held the weapon ready and he looked toward the fire.
It flamed up in a small clearing in a semicircle of huts. Two men came out of the centre hut and pulled the logs of the fire a little further apart so that the flames decreased. They stood there a moment and they looked carefully about and they listened and then they walked back and ducked into the hut.
The Captain lay at the centre of the line with his horse standing hooded behind him. Johnny Fingo lay beside him and Providence and the gagged children beside him in turn. They heard a sound behind and turned and listened but could see nothing. Down the line men looked about in alarm and the sound resolved itself into hooves and bare footfalls and five heathen warriors came through their lines with a single horse. The heathens stepped quietly and purposefully and the man with the horse came directly to the tree where the kid lay and the horse snorted and shied.
The warriors stopped and looked about and met the eyes of the men who surrounded them. The Captain looked to his horse but the beast stood placid under its hood. A long silence ensued in that murky forest and various outcomes were considered. Then one of the heathens stepped on quietly towards the huts and the others followed. They proceeded as if what they had seen lying all about them in the undergrowth were no more than pale decaying logs.
The man with the horse stepped away from the roots of the tree and urged the beast on. The horse demurred and the heathen tugged at the crude rope bridle. The horse plunged forward and Evans rolled clear of its hooves and cursed under his breath. The heathen passed on towards the huts as though obedient to a philosophy which proves that that which is not acknowledged does not exist.
The Captain looked to Lieutenant Bruce and that man lifted his shoulder and hand in a gesture which conveyed an uncertainty and indecision with which the Captain could only concur. They turned their heads to watch and the five heathen came to the clearing and one of them stepped over the stone breastworks and went to the centre hut and bent at the doorway. Three men came out and conferred with the visitor.
The Captain looked again to Lieutenant Bruce and a breeze sprung up and the Captain’s horse caught the scent of
the heathen mount. It shook its head and threw off its hood and neighed. There was silence for some moments and then men armed with spears came out of the huts like angry bees from a hive and the Captain gave the order to fire.
The kid and the joiner had their sights on the door of a hut and they pulled their triggers and saw great confusion sown. The fire of a hundred rifles was brought to bear on five doorways and half of the heathen warriors there were dead or writhing wounded in the dim firelight. The irregulars rose and charged forward after the Captain and women and children wailed and some started to come from the huts.
The kid ran and leapt through the undergrowth and he tripped over a vine and rolled and came to his feet with his weapon still in hand. He ran on with Evans and the joiner leaping and screaming before him. The Captain cleared the low stone breastworks like a cannibal ape in an ecstasy. He fired the Adams into the melee and saw shapes thrown back into the huts.
The kid jumped the wall and next to him Smith was pierced through the chest by a thrown spear. There was a dim chaos before and the kid came upon it swinging his rifle and a figure went down under the stock and Evans leapt upon it and pulled back its head and his reaping hook sliced into its neck and the kid felt hot liquid spray in his face.
There were women and children screaming from the huts and the joiner took a flaming branch from the fire and set it to a grass wall. The kid stood drenched and turned and swung at a small dark shape and felt the stock smash through and some human thing crumpled without a sound. The flames began to climb and a child emerged in a blanket all afire and the Captain shot her and she fell back into the hut as other women and children came out and stumbled over the bodies that lay there and Higgs and Basson came across the clearing and fell upon them.