The Sands of Kalahari

by William Mulvihill

  But they did not harm him. Some sort of a deal had been made between the two leaders. They all walked slowly to the cluster of trees where others waited.

  There were several huts that looked like messy beehives, made of grass and thorn branches, each hut built close to one of the low, wind-twisted trees which seemed to hold it upright. A few old people sat around in front of the huts, almost unconcerned over the arrival of the new group; they sat warming themselves in the sun, close to smokeless fires like ancient mummies, their yellowish bodies incredibly wrinkled. They looked older than anyone Smith had ever seen.

  Thin dry strips of meat hung from some of the branches of the trees and next to most of the shelters there were neat rows of ostrich shells half buried in the soil. The water supply. The villagers melted away from the newcomers and some of them returned to their tasks. They took Smith to an empty hut and made it clear that it was his; he smiled and sat down before it and nodded. A child came to him with an ostrich shell; another ran off and came back with a tsamma melon. He was hungry and he chopped it open with a short stick and ate it and the children gathered and watched him. He made faces at them and offered them bits of it but they backed away, tiny pygmylike creatures with quick eyes, frightened and fascinated at the black giant the strangers had brought from the far desert.

  Smith watched the villagers too. The apricot-skinned women pounding with mortar and pestle, scraping skins, coming in from the far veldt carrying their digging sticks and animal skins lumpy with roots and tubers. Some of them cooked in clay pots, others carried tiny infants slung on their hips. They pretended not to watch him but their interest was impossible to hide.

  He stayed at the Bushman village for three days.

  The fear left him. They were not going to eat him or sacrifice him in some gruesome fashion; they fed him and did not bother him and in the end Fu Manchu and Wrinklebelly, the two hunters, took him with them on another trip over the grassland.

  He was almost sad to leave the little group of villagers but he sensed that the group was about to break up and scatter to find the ever-moving and quickly depleted food supply. They were hunters, foragers; the huts might be used only a few weeks a year; the group might move in a great circle with the seasons. No civilized men had ever really lived with true wild Bushmen, knew the cadence of their dreams, their soul.

  Perhaps the meeting of the two groups was some annual affair for the young to seek mates outside of their blood group, their clan. Smith studied them and saw timid love play between some of them, sensed in some of the talk among the older boys an excitement when one of the supple girls passed.

  There was much dancing. Every night. One dance was quite obvious, a sort of mimic war between two rows of men who faced each other on their knees, each line shouting at the other, shaking their arms in mock anger, writhing in fury, groaning with effort. It was followed sometimes by another game more familiar to Smith. The two rows faced each other, clapping and humming, and then suddenly they would all hold up their hands with a certain number of fingers raised. If the opposite man had not matched the first man the latter advanced toward him with a short hop, toward a line drawn between the opposing teams. It reminded Smith of matching coins, of tug of war.

  And other dances that sometimes went on into the night, dances that Smith watched from the door of his hut until he fell asleep. A group of the men dancing around a big fire of thorn, hardly moving, their bodies in great turmoil as they tried to move by taking the shortest step possible. The women circling them, clapping and stomping too in rhythm. And once a dance which portrayed a hunt: a graceful Bushman leaping around the fire and over it with his hands close to his head, two fingers raised like horns.

  They played a curious game once too, a game that Smith watched, found himself enjoying, wondering if he should try to play and then deciding against it, afraid that it might break some taboo. The men gathered in a flat space to one side of the huts and they each held a long willowy rod, a thin supple stick. One of them took a peculiar object and hung it on the end of his stick, a hard bulb of some sort hanging on the end of a leather thong. On the other end of the thong was a heavy feather. Suddenly the man whipped the object into the air; it rose high and then plummeted downward, the feather fluttering behind the thong. The men raced for it and the fastest leaped high, caught it with his stick and flung it back into the sky. The men moved with incredible speed and agility. The game reminded Smith of badminton and lacrosse —fantastic to watch. He wondered how old it was, how long it had been played by the little men.

  Civilization was a thin crust. He had broken through and was himself a Bushman in all but outlook. And if he stayed here or in any uncivilized group he would in time think as they thought; his offspring would be wild men.

  The thought terrified him; the delicate arrangements and systems that made life on the outside so easy; the massive industries balanced on knife-edge adjustments; the handful of men who kept it all running and the fewer who were able to improve it, add to it. Modem man was a parasite living off the fat of the past, living on the dividends of a few great brains. He did not gather his food or build his home or rear his children; his hands and his brain were soft; he consumed and manipulated and lived isolated and aloof from the natural world about him. It was comfortable, it was good, it was civilization; but it could vanish overnight if the mechanisms which fed it were destroyed.

  He awoke. Fu Manchu was grinning at him, shaking him. Smith crawled behind him out of the hut, stood up and stretched, saw that it was the moment before dawn. Wrinkle-belly came and spoke with the other hunter. Smith found one of the eggshells next to his hut and drank from it. An old woman came with a big earthen bowl and the three of them ate from it. Smith wondered what it was … chopped-up tubers and roots maybe with ground-up grasshoppers and ant eggs, or tough meat pounded and made edible by the mortar and pestle method. He did not really care. He was hungry and it would keep him alive and nothing else mattered.

  And then they left. The two hunters took him gently by the elbow and pointed far away, then to him, then to themselves. He nodded and followed them, smiling and waving good-by to the tiny children and the old people sitting near their huts. Most of them waved back.

  He hurried after the little hunters. There was excitement in him; he felt, for some reason, that they were taking him to some place closer to civilization. He was a liability and they were going to get rid of him. They would not murder him, not now. They knew he was from the outside world and they feared that world, feared it and overestimated its power over them. They would return him to it and not offend the black men who lived around them. The wars were over; a peaceful act would save one of their own someday.

  The country improved. The trees grew thicker until they were almost parklike but then they ended and the men came to a dry area with a few palm trees growing in the sand. And later the sand went away and they came to a vast reddish plain filled with scrub. The Bushmen moved in a straight line and Smith followed ten feet behind.

  They came, sometime in the early afternoon, to a settlement. They climbed a low ridge and far away there was a group of low buildings and a few lines of smoke trailing into the windless sky. The Bushmen talked excitedly, grinning, and began walking toward the village.

  Smith was excited. It wasn’t another Bushman village; there were mud buildings and the glint of corrugated iron. There was the look of civilization about it. The Bushmen were bringing him to safety. He hurried after them.

  And from the village came a group of people, men and women and children, some of them gaily dressed, all of them noisy. They came closer and closer across the dusty plain and then suddenly stopped. And the Bushmen stopped. The noise died now and Smith realized that the Bushmen had their little bows in their hands, that some of the Negroes in the opposing group carried spears and clubs. They did not trust one another completely.

  A man broke away from the large group and came toward him, a little man, gnarled and grotesque, wearing a castoff sui
t coat and filthy trousers. He was obviously part Bushman or Hottentot and part Negro. He came to within twenty feet of Smith and began talking to the Bushman in their hissing-clicking-sucking language. They talked for several minutes. The man grew restless and angry, happy; he laughed, scowled, scorned. The crowd behind him began to edge closer. Fu Manchu began an excited speech and motioned with his bow and tiny arrow. The interpreter screamed to the mob in another language and they backed away. They knew of Bushman poison.

  And then the talk was over. The ragged leader returned to his people and talked for a time with some of the other shabby men. Then two older boys raced away to the settlement.

  Through it all Smith had stood wordless, half afraid that something would go wrong at the last moment, that the Bushman would grow angry with the others and take him away. It was obvious now that they were selling him, trading him to the others. He stood in the sun and waited and saw the women pointing at him, snickering at his nakedness. Soon now it would be over.

  He studied the strangers. There was something wrong about all of them. They were not as tall as they should be and they were weak-looking, dirty. They were something between the Bushmen and civilized natives; they lacked the wild nobility of Fu Manchu and yet they were not westernized.

  They wore the castoff rags of the white man and had none of their own. There was no uniformity of color among them. A few had the apricot color of the Bushman and others were obviously pure Hottentot. And some of them were black and others almost white. One had a Malay’s face but it was twisted and degenerate; another had peppercorn hair and mottled skin.

  He had heard of groups like this in the Kalahari; Sturdevant had talked about them once in the cave. They were in-between people, the refuse of two worlds, hopelessly inbred and isolated in remote settlements, strange half-castes shunned by the white, the black, and the Bushmen.

  The two boys came back from the settlement, leading a fat heifer. The leader took the rein and led it toward the two Bushmen. Fu Manchu went forward and took the animal. Wrinklebelly stood and faced the crowd and it broke up and turned its back on him and began to drift back toward the settlement. Wrinklebelly began edging away, walking backwards a few steps at a time. Beyond him Fu Manchu led the fat cow.

  Four of the men came toward Smith. He was suddenly afraid and turned instinctively to watch the two little Bushmen fade away. The men began talking to him. He shook his head in misunderstanding. He knew that he must not speak English, not until he saw a white man. He did not trust the ragged, dirty men before him. He felt that if he spoke English they would shrink away from him and then fawn over him and then, when they reasoned it all out, they would kill him. He felt these things and he did not speak to them. He grinned and grimaced and shook his head and after a while they grew tired and led him back to the settlement.

  He could smell it long before they came to the first mud house, the smell of a village without plumbing, lying in the sun, inhabited by barbarous, listless people. The smell made him sick.

  He walked with them not as an equal but as a prisoner. They had tried to question him and he recalled now that they had been sharp and curt with him. They had bought him from the Bushmen. He was a slave.

  They took him through the stinking village. The people no longer stared at him. A ratlike dog snarled from the narrow off-center door of one of the mud hovels. Refuse was strewn all over the rutted street and in the festering alleys. They walked on and came to the end of the street to a partially built mud house. Three men stopped working for a moment and looked up listlessly. They wore assorted rags covered with wet clay. One was an old man, black-skinned with white hair. Another was a boy with a Hottentot face and a big-boned whitish body. The third was almost all Bushman but there was the look of the feeble-minded in the slack face and strange eyes.

  And there was another man who sat in the shade of a half-finished wall. He got up and came to the others. He was relatively tall and carried a heavy club. He shouted something at the three workers and they returned to their tasks.

  He came to Smith and studied him while the other men talked. Suddenly he reached forward and took Smith’s arm and pushed him into the half-finished hut, shouting at him. Smith stood and wondered if he should speak, tell them who he was, an American. They would understand some English, enough.

  The boss was shouting at him, waving his club. The other men joined in the shouting, their animal-like faces twisted, dangerous. Smith fumbled backwards, bumped into the old man. He nodded to the advancing men. He would work, he would obey.

  He found that the men were making mud in a pit and then carrying it to the walls, a handful at a time, smearing on a spot which the sun had already dried. A tedious, primitive task. He joined them, still naked, still frightened by the heavy club and the abject people.

  The four men went away and the guard came back and stood watching them for a while. No one spoke. They threw dry clay into the pit and sometimes added water; they stirred it with their feet, carried it dripping to the lumpy walls. Smith worked harder than the others; he knew that he was being appraised. He sensed that the guard wanted to beat him, to make him realize that he was a slave, that he must obey instantly.

  The day wore on, and Smith began to relax. He had survived the desert; he was alive. He would be alive tomorrow and the day after that. And someday it would happen: a white policeman would come to the settlement, or a cattle inspector or some wandering busybody, someone who would save him, take him away, free him. Until then, he was a slave.

  CHAPTER VI

  GRACE MONCKTON and Mike Bain got up and ate some honey and a melon. Then they walked down the valley to forage. Grimmelmann was still resting in his bed. O’Brien had left while it was still dark.

  They wandered for two hours along the cliff edge, finding lizards and chasing them, resting in the shade of great boulders, going on. As they got farther away from the cave the cliff grew lower and easier to climb.

  Grace cornered a brown lizard and clubbed it to death. Mike cleaned it with a penknife and they wrapped it in a cloth.

  “I think we could climb to the top here,” Grace said.

  Bain looked up, studied the faults, the long inclines.

  “Let’s try it,” he said. He had never been this far down on the cliff top. They might find a new colony of lizards.

  They started up, not hurrying, picking their way along. They came to a sheer wall and stopped.

  “There’s only one way,” Bain said. “I can reach the top if you can hold part of my weight in your cupped hands.”

  “Let’s try,” Grace said. “I don’t want to go back the same way.” She cupped her hands, braced her feet against the stone, waited. Bain studied her and the rock wall. He backed away and then ran toward her, put his bare foot in her locked hands and flung himself upward. He felt her strain and push and then her hands parted. But he had a grip on the edge of stone above and he pulled himself up.

  He lay flat on the hot stone, reached down for the girl and found her wrists. He pulled her up slowly and surely and she helped him, finding purchase on the rock with her bare toes.

  They lay exhausted on the stone. The rest of the climb would be easy.

  Bain became aware of her. He could smell her hair, her warm body; her breasts strained against the tattered, half-buttoned blouse; her golden thighs were only half covered by her ragged skirt.

  She turned, saw that he watched her and smiled. She wondered about Bain; he was handsome in a haggard way.

  They got up and continued the climb, wordless.

  They killed two more sleepy lizards. Bain threw a stone at a small hawklike bird but he missed and they watched it fly away over the vast desert. He realized that he hated O’Brien. When night came Grace would go to him as she now did every night.

  They walked on along the top of the escarpment and the rock was hot on their bare feet. They came upon a deep, well-like hole in the solid rock, a circular pit that was twelve or fifteen feet deep and the same distance acro
ss. They stood and looked down into it.

  “What caused this?” Grace wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Mike said. The sides were too smooth to allow anyone to climb down; he had an urge to descend into the pit but it would be impossible without a rope. “Maybe long ago the hole was a chunk of softer stone that got mixed up with the granite. Time and the elements might have worn it away.”

  “It’s strange,” Grace said.

  Bain reached for her, found her wrist, held her. “Be careful, the rock’s slippery.” He pulled her back from the edge of the pit. She was close to him again, warm, sweaty, golden-haired, beautiful.

  He let go of her wrist and walked on. She was O’Brien’s.

  Jefferson Smith worked and slept and ate. He grew accustomed to the monotony of his new life. He waited for his rescuers to come.

  He wondered about the others, about Grimmelmann and Mike Bain and Grace. What would O’Brien do with them? He did not like to think about it, for there was nothing he could do. He could not run off and cross the desert, he could not assert himself or identify himself without running the risk of being murdered. He was trapped. There was nothing to do but wait and hope, live from day to day.

  He studied the people, the pattern of life in the small community, and was appalled by their ignorance and filth, their weary existence. They had forgotten their old ways and had not learned the new. There was a lethargy in them, an emptiness; they tended their scrub cattle and their dusty gardens and existed, but their life was without hope and art and music. They seemed to have no traditions and no future. They were uncomfortable and dirty and sad.

  The building, the shapeless hovel that he and the other slaves had made with mud and sticks, was at last finished and they were put to new tasks. They carried heavy skins of water from the well to the powdery dry fields, watering each individual plant and vine. They ranged from the village and collected bundles of sticks. They repaired cattle pens and collected sun-dried cakes of dung.