NOW THAT THE routine of camping was clearly established, we spent two whole days travelling until sundown. For the first day the new arrangement of Comfort helping Spode seemed to work miracles. But on the second there was a regression. Comfort came drifting back to my side and I had to give him the orders I imagined Spode would like instead of Spode himself taking control. Charles, however, to my delight distinguished himself by spotting long before any of the veterans, a twenty-foot python looking like a stocking filled for Christmas, dragging itself ponderously through the bush. Armed only with a stick he tried gallantly to head it off and turn it back towards Spode to film, but the serpent was not willing.
Soon after sunrise on the second day out from Maun I was startled to hear an outburst of rapid gunfire ahead of me. I came to Ben’s Land-Rover abandoned in the track with three dead wild dogs lying close beside it. Some moments later Ben and John reappeared dragging two more dead dogs after them. It was an extraordinary demonstration of Ben’s quick ractions and accuracy as a rifleman: five shots at five of the swiftest animals in Africa and all five fatal. Ben’s sun-lined face had a benign expression on it. I believe of all natural things he hated only the wild dogs for their ruthless ways with weaker animals. He climbed back into his vehicle like a horseman swinging into his saddle, and we were off again.
Towards evening of the same day we reached a small rest camp, used by the recruiting organization of the Mines, called Sepopa: the place of the eddies. It was on the edge of the swamp about ninety miles by water below the entrance to the Okovango delta, and the terminal of a small ferry service run by the mines between south and north banks of the marshes. I knew that close by there lived the remnants of a race of dug-out or makorro men. As there was still an hour or two of daylight I went on alone to see if I could contact their headman, a veteran renowned for his travels by makorro and with the musical-sounding name of Karuso, as well as the honorary title among Africans of ‘King of Paddlers’. I did not find him. Instead I met a man, a home-made axe upon his shoulders, walking out of the bush into a long savannah of buffalo grass restless under the tuneful air of evening. He reminded me of a city dweller, umbrella in hand, out for a stroll in the park after a day in the office. To my amazement he knew me at once, said that the ‘big master from Muhembo’ had been there the day before to see Karuso, and that already dug-outs and paddlers, of whom he was going to be one, were standing by down-river.
I slept the better for the axe-man’s news and had, that night, an especially vivid dream. I was in the centre of a great swamp. The sun was setting. Between me and the red of evening rose an enormous tree with a smooth straight trunk rising some hundreds of feet and with its branches and leaves filling much of the sky. In the dream I recognized it as the final object of my search.
Next morning I rose early to tell the others I was leaving them to rest at Sepopa and going on alone to Muhembo. I asked Spode to select only what films he would need in the swamp and took the rest to store in Muhembo. Though there were only two European couples and three bachelors in Muhembo it was a transit depot of great importance to the mines. From all over the roadless country beyond in northern South-West Africa and Angola, year in, year out, sturdy black men made their way towards Muhembo on foot through bush and swamp to apply for work in the mines. I had known it years before, when the men were taken in trucks nine hundred miles or so over the wasteland to the railway of Francistown. But now, whenever their numbers justified it, they were collected by aircraft and flown in a few hours over a distance that had previously taken weeks.
Both the two lone Europeans who administered the depôt were at the airstrip when I arrived. Most of the African population of the village was there too. As always there were many women and children because the able-bodied men were away earning money to pay taxes and buy food. They were an attractive people. They had smooth, shining black skins with a gleam of raven’s wing in the sun on their broad shoulders and long supple legs. The short peppercorn hair of the women was made longer by plaits of fine, black fibre, skilfully woven into it and falling in straight strands to their smooth shoulders. They were naked to the waist and their firm breasts fully exposed. Round their stomachs they wore a kilt made of plaited fibre and beads drawn into patterns of shining black and white. Their faces were illuminated with the feeling that accompanied their animated talk. Their voices were low and when one caught a dark eye it looked at one instantly not as a stranger but as a woman, before the frankness of its own gaze made it shy and a head was quickly turned away. They looked, indeed, more like one of the Libyan tribes vivid in the gossip of Herodotus than a crowd assembled to greet an aeroplane. Yet there they were hemming in the airstrip and their numbers growing as eager new arrivals emerged from the end of a red footpath on the edge of the flaming bush. In the centre of the crowd were two lone European topees, like lobster pots adrift on a dark sea. Their owners, however, I found, were anchored and at home, ready in exchange of wit and good humour with the crowd.
‘They love this moment,’ the senior of the two told me. ‘They even know something about flying that we don’t! It’s humiliating but true. They stand there and can tell from the way the plane approaches which pilot is flying it! You’ll hear them say: “Oh, that’s the bald-headed one coming today,” or “That’s the one with the fire on his head”, “Hippobelly”, “Red-nose”, “Shining face”, “A new one” and heaven knows what! But you can be sure they’ll be right.’
When the aircraft had come and gone we went to this official’s house on the river, where we sat on the veranda among a vast though oddly-ordered chaos of books, magazines, fishing-rods, spoons and flies, and all the paraphernalia that had helped him travel the long years, alone, without injury to his spirit. Almost at our feet, the great Okovango river broke into splinters on the pointed papyrus mat at the door of the swamps. Beyond the green of the marshes the bush of the Northern Kalahari sandveld burned like coal in the fire of the day, which we saw as though through a sheet of Venetian glass, glowing because of the essence of silver water feverishly extracted by the sun.
‘It’s beginning to get hot early this year,’ my host said with a suspicion of foreboding in his voice all the more alarming considering the many seasons he had seen coming and going in that place. ‘But, first, let me tell you what I’ve done for you.’
He had been to see Karuso and provisionally engaged dugouts and paddlers. They were standing by at a place called Ikwagga just below Sepopa. He had left me to settle the terms but they would take me where I wanted to go if the state of water permitted. But the funny thing was, already they had seemed to know where I was going. They were convinced I was looking for the unknown tree in the swamps. ‘Good Heavens!’ I exclaimed, remembering my dream of the night before. ‘Why a tree?’
He explained that deep in the swamps there was an enormous tree, unlike any other tree in the rest of the country. It had as yet no name nor was it known to what species it belonged, but it was called ‘the unknown tree’ by all.
‘Well, I’ve not come for that!’ I laughed.
He nodded and said I could work that one out with Karuso. What really concerned him was my intention to travel so far by dug-out at that time of the year. He begged me not to do so. The swamp was alive with crocodile and hippo. Every year the hippo were more and more aggressive because they had been hunted constantly and badly. Man was now taken, on sight, as an enemy. Only three weeks before, just where the river bent like a cutlass of stainless steel, a hippo had upset a makorro and bitten a man in half. A week before a boy had lost a leg in the same way. So it went on. He asked why not compromise? He had a launch built with timbers stout enough to resist any attack by hippo. It had a small ferry service to run once a week, but he was willing to let me have it for cost price working between schedules. He suggested I should take it as far as the water allowed and then use makorros. ‘In the shallows you’ll have a chance,’ he concluded, ‘but in the deeper channels I wouldn’t put a penny of my money on you.’
He then called in his colleague and for some hours the two of them told me all they could about the swamp. I owe much to what they told me of their unique experience. When I left ‘The Place of the Eddies’ I carried written instructions to the ferryman to place himself under my orders.
The next day we sailed in the launch soon after sunrise. John and Cheruyiot, whom we had left behind with our Land-Rovers and main baggage, waved to us sadly because they too longed to come. Soon the main stream carried us away from the bush-veld banks and into long, deep channels between tall papyrus growth. The smooth, cool, effortless passage over even water after days of hot dusty bumping and bucking eased our troubled senses. Everyone was in a good humour and instantly nicknamed the solemn skipper and his lively engineman ‘Grumpy’ and ‘Shorty’ respectively. Every now and then, away to the south, some high thrust of green over the roof of river forest rose like an explosion of cumulus, uncurling in the dynamic blue. Occasionally the dead stump of a gigantic tree stood out, bare, above the papyrus and reeds bent double with birds, like some bone of pre-Okovango history, and inevitably it wore a gleaming fish-eagle on its top. Giant herons, crested water-birds, hammerheads, kingfishers, crimson bee-eaters, the royal Barotse egrets, and sometimes even sky blue African rollers rose everywhere out of the resounding reeds. Each bay cut in a cliff of green was ardent with white and blue lilies’ hearts, open with abandon to bumble and sun. From one lily leaf to another, lying flat on the surface raced long-legged trotter birds, a silver dust of water at the heels, to cut off translucent insects from refuge in the papyrus shadows. All the time, above the chug-chug of our small engine, the air was loud with the nostalgic call of bird and water-fowl. The sandy spits in the deeper bays were compact with streamlined crocodile. They lay on the sands, eyes shut with delight, mouths wide open while adroit little birds picked their ivory teeth clean of meat. ‘Shorty’, who clearly hated them, begged us to shoot. But we refused. All we shot for dinner were some duck, when they rose like stars from some exclusive water.
Spode without prompting got out his film camera. As I watched him I found my heart beating somewhat faster. It was no longer any use glossing over our present lack of progress with hopes for the future. This journey into the swamp was the final test in an increasingly grave situation for both him and me. As yet we had done scarcely any filming. If he now found nothing worth-while to film it would be a crisis without imaginable end.
I had hardly posed the question to myself when I saw Spode putting away his camera.
‘I can’t work. The engine vibrates too much,’ he turned to me.
‘Whenever you want to film we’ll stop the engine and drift. Just give me the sign,’ I offered.
‘Tomorrow,’ he answered curtly. ‘There’s nothing much anyway to film here.”
About eleven the channel brought us once more to the edge of the bush on the southern bank of the swamp. The makorro people, who had heard the launch an hour before it appeared, were assembled sitting silently in the shade of a great tree on the tiny cape of earth forming the little bay called Ikwagga. There was no hut or kraal to be seen through the bush or grass; only this group of men gravely observing the launch manoeuvring closer and making no sign of greeting or offer of help. It made an odd impression. Most people I know in that part of the world are friendly and demonstrative. These men were neither; not hostile, just withheld and profoundly reserved. Their faces, too, were strangely uneven as if each one belonged to a different race from which he had been torn by a violent fate to be arbitrarily attached to this patchwork assembly before us. Later I understood they had all come together in the swamps not by choice but when escaping destruction by the Matabele in the time of Africa’s great troubles in the past. All I knew at that moment, however, was that I did not really like the look of them. There were several faces that interested me, as for instance the axeman of my previous meeting. When I caught his eye he did smile and lift a hand to point me out to someone beside him. That person immediately rose. He was tall and finely made. Leaning on a punting pole he looked at me intently out of keen brown eyes, a look of great experience. He was in rags put on out of respect for us, but he wore them with unragged elegance if not a certain innate swagger. On his head was a Boer War scout’s khaki hat, with remodelled brim and a string of beads around the crown. As the launch grounded he doffed it, to show a head of grey hair. Obviously he stood ready to speak for them all.
He was of course Karuso, and he forthwith began to bargain for the assembly with eloquence and great pertinacity. It was an affair that could not be hurried. The wage itself was a pretext, but the bargaining was important. Had I agreed immediately to the little money he demanded, all would have felt cheated and the poorer for it. The whole process was essentially a provision of wisdom and an affair of primitive honour that should not be minimized. It was a drama designed also to bring out the human factors to which Karuso was committing them all. I knew they would stop bargaining, not only when the wage seemed fair, but also when they felt they knew what kind of people we were. Well aware that their future conduct would depend a great deal on how I managed this exchange with Karuso I put all I could of time and imagination into it. Soon the others started joining in. Before long I was getting to know them as they slowly unravelled me. Again I did not like my knowledge much. Yet I felt they must do, because I had no other immediate choice.
After two hours I decided the time had come to end it. I made a final and generous offer, climbed into the launch, and started writing a letter while I waited for their answer. For a while longer they talked among themselves and then accepted my offer: twenty-eight men to man thirteen makorros and to join me early the next day.
While the negotiations were going on a slight man with a thin ascetic face and grey hair sat silent and apart from the rest. He did not speak once though I was aware that his eyes hardly ever left my face. When all was decided he suddenly got up.
‘Please,’ he said, turning to me: ‘I would like to come with you.’ He told me his name was Samutchoso. It meant: ‘He who was left after the reaping.’ I had no idea what forces were set in motion when I agreed without hesitation that he could come.
There remained only one more thing to explain.
‘You know, of course,’ I told Karuso, ‘that I’m not looking for the unknown tree!’
For the first time he looked upset. ‘But what else could you be looking for in the swamp, Moren?’ he asked in a voice now pitched high like a woman’s with surprise.
I told him: and asked him what chances we had of finding River Bushmen. He was squatting on the ground and I remember still how he scooped up some earth in his long paddler’s hand, began crumbling it, and then with a far-away look said we might succeed but there were not many left.
‘What’s become of them?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, Moren,’ he said, shaking his grey head. ‘They’re just gone.’ And he let the crumbled earth in his hands trickle through his fingers into the water at his feet.
We spent the night about forty miles on by water, at the last African outpost on the northern edge of the swamps between us and Mann. Below it lay the great unknown swamp district. When we arived there were only a few hours of daylight left. Quickly I extracted all the information I could from an African headman who was clearly fearful of what I proposed to do. He did his best to dissuade me by reciting the disasters inflicted by hippo and crocodile on those who still travelled by makorro the three hundred miles to Maun. When that failed, however, he produced for me as guide a great, simple man who knew the deep interior of the swamps because he made his living trapping and hunting there.
By this time the news of our arrival had spread and a tragic procession of sick and ailing started coming into our camp. A doctor visited this place on the far side of the swamp only once every two or three years. An African dispenser on a vast round called in twice a year. That was all. The need for even the simplest medicines was overwhelming. I treated twenty-seven children for infections of the eye which would probably leave their vision permanently impaired. Many of the little faces already had deep scars at the temples and cheeks where the witch-doctors had cut into the flesh to let out the evil spirit that caused the infection. When I asked the mothers how they could allow that to happen to their children they each exclaimed, indignant in defence of their maternal honour: ‘But what was I to do? Night and day my child cried with pain. Was I to do nothing?’
After the children came persons of all ages with festering sores and unhealed wounds, the inevitable cases of chronic malaria, and a few far gone with sleeping sickness. There were also the cheerful lovers of castor oil trying to maintain a tortured look on their healthy faces so that I should be moved to satisfy their strange addiction for so odd a lubrication! Finally I was taken to a hut where a little wasted boy was stretched out shivering on a mat of reeds in the last rays of the sun. When he saw my white face close to his he let out a sob of fear and turned his head to his mother beside him. I thought he had had pneumonia for over-long and could not live, but none the less I dosed him with a sulpha-drug. In the morning when I saw him again he was shivering no longer, nor was he afraid of me but held firmly to one of my fingers, reluctant to let me go.
I was more than ever glad that I carried more medicines with me than I could possibly need. This kind of occasion and the quickening look in the eyes of those treated seemed great reward. All the time I longed for Spode to film the scene. I felt the camera could catch its import more immediately and vividly than words, and would help to convey its implications to the many who think of Africa’s greatest needs in terms of politics of an alien pattern. However, Spode appeared not only disinterested but deeply involved in the emotions of a private world of his own.
When at last I had finished my amateur nursing the sun was touching the tall papyrus tops. On the far side of the stream, clearly outlined against the bleeding west, a lone paddler was about to turn a makorro into a channel leading into the heart of the impersonal universe of water, darkness, and reeds. Already in the channel a swell had risen full of evening fire to rock his craft over a pool where a hippo had just dived out of sight. Unconcerned, he paddled on with long, easy strokes as if before him was not the evening twilight but the dawn of a new day. His silhouette was slighter than that of any African man and had something oddly Chinese about it.
‘There he is, Moren!’ the headman beside me said, a strangely urgent note in his voice. ‘There he goes.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘The River Bushman,’ he answered.
I wanted to send someone hastening to bring him back, but I was told it would be useless because he was deaf and dumb. For a generation or more he had been living alone on a small island about fifteen miles on into the swamp. There he lived by trapping fish and birds, and from time to time coming out to exchange them for tobacco. His lean-to shelter of grass and reeds on his island, they said, was surrounded with mounds of the bones of fish he had consumed over the years. No one knew where he came from or who his people had been. Whether he knew himself no one could tell. I stood there stirred to the heart, watching his progress across the burning water deeper into the papyrus standing so erect before the night. In that mythological light of the dying day he seemed to me the complete symbol of the silent fate of his race.
At about ten the next morning Karuso and his men burst out of an obscure channel through the reeds, shouting and singing with triumph and relief. Two to each makorro, they stood upright in the long narrow hulls swinging rhythmically from the shoulder and hips as they drove the black dugouts forward across the bright water, racing one another for the harbour below our camp.
‘It looks easy,’ Ben told Vyan and Charles as we watched them coming. ‘But make no mistake about it, it’s very difficult. Years ago I had to train in one of those for a race at Maun and it was harder than learning to ride a bicycle! You can’t just sit or stand still in them. If you do, you upset at once, and then you’re lost. They’re made of wood heavier than water and go like lead to the bottom. You have continually to keep them balanced from the hips, even as a passenger. It’s really a skilled job, and the first time I did it, I was stiff for days! But look at them! Don’t they make a lovely picture?’
He turned to look over his shoulder at Spode sitting silent and unhappy on a pile of baggage, and then turned questioningly to me. I pretended not to see. Spode had already dismissed an earlier suggestion for filming with a cross ‘You don’t understand, Laurens. One can’t film in this way . . .’ In what way one could film he had not stayed to say. Besides his cameras were locked away in their cases. In London I’d imagined that we would make a film to catch reality on the wing: now, it seemed, we’d be lucky to shoot it sitting.
Karuso, already leaping out of his makorro like a young boy, shouted: ‘Moren, if it were not for God I would not be here now! Four times I was attacked by hippo bulls!’
‘And I three times,’ someone else interrupted, jumping ashore.
‘I, five times,’ another yelled.
So each pair of paddlers had their own story of early morning attack, particularly two boasters whose faces I had disliked the day before, and who now claimed to have survived the maximum of eight furious onslaughts. Only ‘He that was left after reaping’ and his companion, a tall young man with narrow lips, broad shoulders, an open unclouded face, and a name signifying ‘Long-axe’, volunteered no information about their journey. When I asked Samutchoso if they too had been attacked, he looked surprised and shook his head in emphatic denial.
None the less, exaggerated as were some of the paddlers’ tales, there was enough truth in them to confirm the wise advice given us: namely, not to use makorros until absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, we ourselves had gone one better than our advisers. The launch seemed to us big enough both to hold our paddlers and to take their makorros in tow. That way the journey, we felt, would be safer and faster for all.
When we told Karuso of the plan his relief and delight were intense. It took him and his men only a short while to tranship their baggage and food which, since they looked to us to feed them on the meat we would shoot, was little. In the heat of the day we were once more afloat and driving east as fast as the launch would go. The huts and the shouts of the uncomprehending people who crowded the banks below our camp soon fell away behind the dense papyrus screens. For long, however, we heard the great drum outside the headman’s hut, the most melancholy drum I have ever heard tapping out a call of farewell in a curious sobbing and inverted sound which translated itself unbidden in my imagination as:
Go! Go! Going Gone!
Go! Go! Going Gone!
We held on through the brilliant afternoon, twisting and turning with the stream, as it pushed its way backwards and forwards through dense swamp growths. Sometimes the sun shone full in our faces; at others it burnt the back of our necks. From time to time I climbed up in the prow to look over the cliffs of reeds, rushes, and papyrus growing along the water’s edge. The bush-veld vanished. There was nothing solid left in sight, only this world of grass, uneasily stirring in the draught drawn by the furnace of the surrounding desert, and all along the smarting horizon was the glow of transubstantiated sulphur where the great fire was ceaselessly tended. After the first rush of excited chatter even the paddlers were driven to silence, or if they spoke they spoke in whispers.
In the evening we moored ourselves to an island. It was barely an inch or two above the prevailing water, about fifty yards by fifty, made of sodden black clay and frail trees so entangled that one could barely see the sky through their branches and leaves. So isolated was it that several of the water-birds had made their nests only a foot or two above the surface. Two of the nests were filled with fluffy yellow chicks all screaming for food, and we looked straight down into their pink throats as we clambered out of the launch to go ashore. All the while their frightened mothers flew in circles round us moaning with despair.
Once ashore we lit enormous fires to cook our food and smoke out the mosquitoes. We crept early under our nets, all night long hearing the mosquitoes singing their wild pagan hymn. Often the sound of their tense song was drowned by crashes of impatient hippos cutting through difficult papyrus knots, or the noise of great bulls diving for refreshment in the starlit water and huffing and puffing with delight whenever they broke to the surface. Some of their more violent splashes drove the water lapping over the edges of the thin sheet of clay on which we slept and sent a tremor through the foundations of our precarious earth. I lay as was my habit apart from the others, in order to be free to make the rounds of the camp when necessary without disturbing my companions. From where I was I could not hear the sleepers. There was no human sound to come between me and the audible life of the great swamp.
At the core of that ancient pre-natal music my heart made its bed and rested beyond all disquiet of man and uncertainty of future days.
Just before the sun rose we sailed on again. The stream, which falls barely a foot in over a hundred miles, seemed still more unsure of its direction east. We twisted and turned with it to all points of the compass, but no matter to which extreme it took us no firm land or bush-veld tree-top could be seen from my post in the prow. The hippo, warned by the noise of our engines and in any case accustomed to forsake the streams in the heat of the day, left us only a silky swell to remind us of them, or a dripping, muddied tunnel deep in the reeds where they had gone, heaving, to their rest. Judging by these and other signs I was sure there must be thousands of hippo in the vicinity. Could we but silence the siren-song of birds and shut off our engines, we would hear a tidal surge of snoring blurring the clarity of the day around us.
As we went deeper into the interior the crocodile seemed to grow bigger, sleeker, and less alert. They were sleeping in the sun on every spit of earth that protruded beyond the cool papyrus shadows. We would be upon them before they were aware of us and then, instantly, they took straight to the water like bronze swords to their sheaths. One, surprised on a sandy shallow, gave the ground a resounding smack with his tail, hurled himself high in the air, and looped a gleaming prehistoric loop straight into the deepest water. Round another bend we sailed into the midst of a feud between two desperate males. They rose half out of the water, their small forefeet sparring like dachshund puppies, but their long jaws snapping and grappling with incredible rapidity. They went under still wrestling, the tips of their tails agitating the water just beneath the surface like a shoal of eels. Where they vanished a scarlet bee-eater swooped low from the bank and I saw its reflection scatter confetti on the broken water.
Soon after sunrise the first column of smoke stood upright, a palm purple with distance, on the eastern horizon. My pulse quickened. No smoke without fire; no fire without man! Could it, by some miracle, be a sign of River Bushman? I signalled to Karuso and our guide to join me. A long and earnest consultation took place between us. They agreed on the possibility of my interpretation but they thought it more likely that the water in the swamps now was getting low enough for odd hunters from the few African posts around to move in after buffalo and other game. They said there were a few hardy hunters who each year before the rains burnt certain favourite areas of the swamp in order to bring out the shy antelope that lived there, and to attract them and their spring progeny to snares set cunningly among the succulent young shoots that would soon arise out of the ashes of their fires.
‘But surely this stuff is too green and wet to burn?’ I exclaimed, waving my hand at the hundreds of miles of vivid swamp around us.
None the less, they assured me gravely, without a smile at my innocence, I would soon be able to see for myself that it not only burned but burned well if one had patience to kindle it. Before long I spotted two more columns of smoke north and south of us. As the morning went on they grew steadily in size and spread fanwise in the higher atmosphere until the smoke of all three were joined and the air astringent with transpired resin and burning fibre. We saw more and more palms and, finally, dense clumps of great trees standing up with sombre determination in the flat green under an arch of blue through which the smoke of remote uncontrolled fires now drifted densely. Like so many trees in love with water, great and straight as were their stems, their leaves tended to be frail, tender, and pointed, and to curl shyly about the intricate branches not unlike another kind of smoke or mist. Yet all were clear signs that the swamp was forming more and greater islands. At that distance, to me, one clump of trees and feather of palm was very much like another. To our guide, however, each group was different and he proceeded to read them like separate words forming a sentence in a well-thumbed book.
At noon the stream brought us alongside an island where our guide said we could safely land. At first glance it looked like a junction for the main nocturnal traffic of hippo, for the clay was broken with their spoor, and the paths they had trodden ran in all directions into the reeds. But scarcely had we landed when Vyan called me. He, Ben, and the guide were on their knees in the clay studying some of the largest buffalo spoor I had ever seen. The spoor was fresh, and our guide looked up, his eyes shining with excitement, smacked his lips loudly, and said with a deep laugh: ‘Soon plenty of meat.’
Though the buffalo spoor and the steadily narrowing stream convinced our ferrymen that the launch was near the end of its journey, we had to hold on in this way for another four hours. It was the hottest time of the day and even the natural life of the swamp had withdrawn to rest. The birds and crocodile vanished. There was so little to distract the eye that most of our company dozed, their heads deep on their chests. However, I could not take my eyes off the swamp. The columns of smoke, the buffalo spoor, all had stirred me deeply. I had a hunch that despite the blank look of the papyrus grass, people, perhaps Bushmen, were near, and I feared that if I allowed my concentration to lessen for one single instant I might miss some sign or clue vital to our purpose.
Then, about two hours out from our last port of call, I thought I was rewarded. Between me and the sun, almost down to the glassy water-level, the papyrus was shyly parted by small yellow hands and a young woman’s face peered carefully through the stems. A pair of odd Mongolian eyes, bright even in the shadows, looked up straight into mine.
I took the sleepy Comfort roughly by the arm to waken him but in that moment the face disappeared.
‘No, Moren!’ Comfort said, peering deep into the green. ‘No! I see nothing at all. It must have been the play of the water and shadow on the reeds.’
‘Why then are those fine papyrus tops trembling so?’ I asked, pointing to where gilded tips vibrated like a nerve with fever above the place where I had seen the face.
‘Oh, that! It’s the wind coming to turn the day,’ he answered and went back to his sleep.
I climbed up into the prow. There was no island near. If it had, indeed, been a human face how could it have got there? What feet could have carried it over the papyrus water, and where could it have come from? There was no apparent channel through the reeds even for a makorro. On reflection it all seemed so unlikely, and had passed so swiftly and obscurely, that I could not even be certain I had not imagined the incident. Yet two hours later when we came to the end of the journey by launch I still saw the face vivid in the shadows above the bland water.
The island on which we disembarked was the biggest we had yet seen, and the first of a kind of marsh archipelago. It was crowned in the centre with a copse of magnificent trees in full leaf, and instead of being merely an inch or two above the water was raised a foot at the edges and slightly higher in the centre. The grass and clay were criss-crossed with hippo tracks and crocodile slithers but unlike our last resort it rang solid underfoot. A mile and a half below the island the main Okovango channel ran into a triumphant papyrus barrier, then broke up and vanished into obscure runnels between the roots and plaited growth of the deep centre of the swamp. East of the island lay a broad lagoon which, our guide assured us, was linked to other lagoons forming a gleaming chain of water which, in the right season, would lead a makorro through to the river that flows a further hundred and fifty miles past Maun. Both he and Karuso, however, believed we would now find the water-level too low, though both were prepared to try to make passage. One thing was certain. We could not go on by launch. On the other hand, if the water ahead was too low for makorros, it would be too low also for a return to Muhembo by any other route except the main channel.
From what I had seen on our journey I realized I could not expose my companions, particularly Spode, to the dangers of a slow journey by makorro against the current on the main stream. Therefore I arranged with the ferrymen (who had to leave almost immediately if they were to be in time for their scheduled ferry service at ‘The Place of the Eddies’) to return to the island as soon as their run was accomplished. Either we would be there to meet them; or else I would leave written instructions for them buried in a tin in an agreed place. As we had come no more than two hundred miles by water from the entrance to the swamps, I reckoned they could do the round journey in five or six days.
I settled all this as quickly as possible because all the time I was aware of the potential forces of disassociation among the paddlers. They had behind them a far easier journey than they had bargained for. Yet judging by their faces the long hours of idleness in the launch had only increased their latent capacity for dissatisfaction. Also they were very hungry for the meat of which the average African gets too little and needs so much. I reckoned that before long they would come in a disgruntled body to demand more food; and I did not want that to happen. Believing that what one gives unasked is worth a hundred of that conceded on demand, I was determined to use what daylight was left in an effort to get meat for our evening meal. At that moment it seemed to me our whole future might depend upon the issue of the hunt. I organized three shooting parties and sent one, under Vyan, and another under Ben, into the areas which the guide thought most likely to have game. Karuso and two of his best hunters went with Ben; the guide and two others went with Vyan. Since I was less in practice and had a new gun I took the least likely and the wettest area across the main stream. Samutchoso, Long-axe, and two others came with me. The look of revived interest on even the most sullen of faces as we all set out with our guns on our arms was most encouraging.
My own party crossed the channel in two makorros. It was my first experience of this craft. I sat in the middle with my .375 across my knees, because it was the hour when the hippo begin to re-emerge from their beds of reeds and pools of sleep. Indeed, before we left the bank Long-axe, paddle in hand and erect in the prow, first looked carefully up- and down-stream. Then, satisfied the channel was clear, he called softly on Samutchoso to shove off, and in a second they were paddling with long sweeps as fast as they could for the cliff of papyrus opposite. Where I sat, the sides of the makorro were barely three inches clear of the water and I realized at once what Ben had meant about the difficulty of keeping balanced so temperamental a craft. I found myself moving continually from the hips like someone riding a tight-rope, and had to discipline myself not to extend my arms also. Yet my companions, upright on the footboard, rode the waters with a confident rhythm that instantly rebuked my uncertain waist. The other makorro followed serenely in our wake and once we had both reached the shadows of the papyrus turned to slide into the shelter of the green.
All the while we spoke only in the lowest of whispers. It was astonishing how sound travelled in the quiet evening air. For a long time we heard the normal talk of the camp behind us, and however silently the polished crocodile or larded hippo took to the creamy water round us, the ripples resounded like flute-song among the reeds. Only when the noise of the camp had died did we make an effort to land on a raft of uprooted papyrus caught among the trunks of some young trees. Long-axe, in one supple stride, stepped straight over the prow, took the grass mooring ropes of both makorros in hand, and tied them to a trunk. When he had done so he turned to beg us, with a finger on his curved lip, for silence.
Leaving two men with the makorros, he, Samutchoso, and I, barefoot, waded carefully through a broad channel of water between our raft and an ancient termite mound of immense size which had a great tree planted in the middle of its crown. To my amazement, beneath the water my feet trod not in mud or clay but on firm Kalahari sand. There, as everywhere in the swamp, earth and clay existed only in islands; all else was water and pure drift sand. Without a word having been spoken I was grateful to see Long-axe and Samutchoso behaving like veteran hunters; Long-axe keeping his eyes focused on what might lie ahead; Samutchoso ignoring the distance and concentrating on what was around our feet. After that I felt less apprehensive of crocodile. Soon we were creeping up the shadow-side of the mound, and when at last we looked furtively over the summit I thought I had never seen anything more beautiful.
The sun was low and already beginning to redden. Above us the sky was intensely blue and without a bird or cloud, but round the sun was formed a wide band of emerald green with an inner ring of gold. The island trees and the tender curls of slim young palms on tip-toe in the water rose like the smoke of hunters’ fires from vast fields of papyrus, reeds, and grass, all tasselled and so lit with light that they might have been corn ripening for a newly forged sickle of the eager moon. Wherever the shadows lay the swamp was purple and, within the purple, like cut-glass buttons on young velvet, was a sparkle of round water. All had the look of things made pure for sleep in devout ablution. Yet even more impressive than the colour, the crystal clarity of the immense scene, and the perfection of the curve of the horizon going towards the night smoothly as a ripple left by a round pebble in a round pond, was the quality of silence rising from this evening world. It was not so much an absence of sound as a delicate music plucked by the long fingers of the light from that finely strung hour to send to sleep a world that had suffered much under the sun. I looked at Samutchoso and with apparent irrelevance the expression on his ascetic old face reminded me that it was Sunday and that I had overlooked it.
At that moment Long-axe, tense as a bow-string, whispered in my ear: ‘Look! Moren, look! Lechwe!’
Some distance away a luminous sprinkle of water was thrown up against the dark reeds. I could just distinguish the outline of a shy and graceful antelope picking its way carefully through the water between two mounds. So still was it that a faint tinkle of the spangle of water on its evening shoes just reached my ear. But it was too indistinct and too far for a shot, though we all thought I might have a chance from the farthest of the two mounds. We made for it as fast and as silently as we could, only to find that the lechwe had changed direction and we had not bettered our position. We tried again to get nearer but with the same disappointing results until at last the sun stood in scarlet, on the blue horizon. There was no time left now for more manoeuvring. The lechwe, uneasy, stood between us and the light, up to its pointed chin in reeds, and looking hard in our direction. It was my last chance to shoot, but so forlorn a chance that it was hardly worth taking. I reckoned the distance was a hundred and fifty yards; the visible target an elegant head and a bit of smooth slim throat; the direction almost straight into a sun level with the eye. If I had not been so convinced of the absolute necessity of getting meat for the camp I would not have attempted it for fear of wounding the lechwe. But I had heard no shots from the other hunters. If they had shot, in that silence I would have heard them. I looked at my companions. Both faces were solemn with resignation to a vain issue of the hunt and offered neither advice nor encouragement. In my hands was the new gun which I had bought because of my wife’s insistence. I had not yet fired at a live target, though, of course, I had zeroed it on a marked one. I said a wordless prayer to the unknown gods of the world around me and aimed at the living target. As soon as I had the lechwe within my sights I shot quickly without deliberation and as much from instinct as from observation. As the harp-like silence fled swiftly from the day, the lechwe vanished instantly in the long reeds. I was certain I had missed, but my two companions were shouting: ‘Oh! Our master. Oh! Our father. You’ve hit it. Lo! The lechwe is dead!’
‘No,’ I told them, ‘it was an impossible shot. I think I’ve only frightened it and it’s off round that mound.’
Yet, when we waded through the water now red with the sacrifice of day, we found the lechwe shot through the middle of its long throat, the bone of the neck so cleanly broken that there was no look of pain on its delicate face. Its coat was golden with warmth and its long magnetic toes were still coming, trembling, together. Yet I had no regret at so needful a killing. Indeed I felt a profound gratitude to the animal and life that I had been allowed to provide food for so many hungry men.
‘If only Ben and Vyan could now have the same luck,’ I thought, ‘we’ll be safe for a few days.’
However, they had had no such luck. I could tell that instantly from the tense, silent way in which they and the entire camp lined the island bank when we grounded on it in the dark. All had heard the shot and because of the late hour had been afraid to trust the sound. I was greatly rewarded by the look in Ben’s and Vyan’s eyes and the shouts of welcome and praise that went up from the others when they saw the sleek lechwe carried ashore into the leaping firelight of our camp.
Under my net that night, listening to an indignant hippo bull snorting and stamping around our camp because we had stolen his favourite moonlight walk, I thought long about the nature of the link between the kill and my wife’s strange insistence, so many weeks before, that I should buy for myself the ‘best gun in the world’.
Early the next morning the paddlers, singing lustily, lifted their makorros out of the main stream and carried them high on their shoulders to the lagoon on the far side of the island. Spode, too, was there filming the scene. When the makorros were launched again on the far water he came with us, camera in hand, in a craft of his own to film the probing first lap of our journey deeper into the swamp. He worked hard and well until we ran into difficulties in the channel connecting one lagoon with the next. It was clearly too shallow for any but the lightest of craft to get through and I thought it useless to waste the energies of the whole party forcing a way through until it was established that we could go on beyond. Therefore I suggested to Spode that he and I should go on in two of the lightest makorros to explore the swamp ahead. He refused at once, saying the sun would soon be too high for effective filming. As he had already given us a long day’s work I accepted his refusal gracefully, though I could easily have countered that where we went in the afternoon the light would again be right for filming. So I sent them all back to camp, and asked Vyan and Ben to cross over to the area where I had shot the lechwe and try to shoot more food for us, and decided to push through the swamps alone. Ben, however, was reluctant for me to do this. He pleaded that either he or Vyan should go on with me. The swamp, he said, was full of the worst-tempered buffalo in Africa. There was hardly a bull in it that hadn’t a slug or two in his hide and black hatred in his heart, because the moment the herds tried to leave the swamp they were hunted and hurt by the worst shots armed with the worst guns in the world. Ben argued with unusual vehemence that one should never hunt buffalo except in pairs, and nowhere was that truer than in the long grasses and dense reeds of the central swamp.
I tried to reassure him, saying I was not setting out to hunt buffalo but merely to examine the water-way and islands for signs of Bushmen. Besides I would not be alone since Samutchoso, Long-axe, Long-axe’s cousin, a man with greying hair and a steady brown eye, Comfort, and our guide were coming with me.
Ben interrupted almost impatiently, saying the point was I might run into buffalo unexpectedly and then paddlers armed only with spears would be unable effectively to help.
Touched as I was by his concern, I reminded him that, much as I would like to have one of them with me, we could not afford the waste in manpower. It was imperative if we were to get on with our search the next morning that we got more meat that day. The lechwe was almost finished and I hoped he and Vyan would set about replacing it as swiftly as possible.
At this Vyan took his pipe out of his mouth and said: ‘He’s right, Ben. But keep a watch out, Laurens, won’t you! If you do run into buffalo, try and keep a tree or two between you and them!’
So I set out across the still waters of the home lagoon alone with my black companions. I travelled ahead with our guide in the prow and Long-axe in the stern; Comfort and the other two following behind in another makorro. The lagoon was flashing like a mirror with light. Near the edges the blue and white lilies shone like stars and a giant-crested heron curtsied repeatedly to his own mauve and gold reflection. But in the centre the water was vacant and deeply amber. Ahead a crocodile slipped neatly, almost without a ripple, into the lagoon. Then two hippo nostrils and a pair of pointed ears rose hard by, as if swinging the periscope of their submarine-being upon us.
‘If his ears start fluttering like a bird’s wing and then lie back like a cheetah’s,’ our guide whispered urgently, ‘please shoot, Moren!’
However ears and nostrils, like two toads on the water, remained still long enough for us to reach the channel between the home lagoon and the next. The channel was just wide enough to take our makorros. My companions laid down their paddles and produced their long forked punting poles. To my relief they managed to push our slender craft with little loss of speed through the reeds and sedges. These rose to a height of about ten feet all around us. I could not see through them at all, and their spurred tops waved rhythmically over the bowed heads of my tall companions. The sky itself was reduced to another blue-black channel as if it were a narrowed reflection of the water below in a mirror above. Suddenly the blue vanished, the channel became a tunnel through columns of branches of interwoven trees. The startled eyes of a baboon looked into mine from a perch fifteen feet above. It let out a booming bark of warning and immediately the silence was broken by the crashes and screams of an invisible multitude of baboons leaping wildly from branch to branch out of our way.
‘Oh! You thing of evil,’ Long-axe exclaimed, aggrieved. ‘What is the use of us keeping so silent when you cry ‘Beware!’ so loudly to the world, and that not even to a world of your friends?’
For a hundred yards or more we poled our way with difficulty through the intricate tunnel to emerge once more into an open channel between tall reeds. A quarter of a mile on we reached a great open lagoon where we looked on many miles of islands set in silver water. We took once more to the paddle. Our guide seemed to have no hesitations about the way and set his course like a homing pigeon. The wind of our increased speed was cool in our hair and on our faces. As always, for fear of attack by hippo in deep water, the paddlers never slackened until they were near shelter of some kind. On the far side we entered another channel and so it went on for some hours, lagoon, channel, and once more lagoon. Only the channels became narrower and the lagoons broader and shallower. About one o’clock, perhaps sixteen miles from the home lagoon, we found the passage east shut against us.
Our guide put his punting pole down firmly and said: ‘If we cannot enter here, Moren, we’ll have to lift and carry the makorros for two days before we find water deep enough again to go on.’
We had clearly come to the highest and most solid part of the swamp. Much as I would have liked to go on to Maun by water, I was not over-disappointed. We were through the outer defences, across the last moat, and within the inmost keep of this formidable stronghold of ancient life. If there were River Bushmen still to be found in organized entities it would be here among the sparkling islands rising now everywhere out of the burning water. Behind screens of elegant reeds and sedges and fringes of palms, their dense bush and gleaming crown of lofty wood stood out resolutely in the blue.
‘Do you think there could be any people there?’ I asked our guide. I did not mention Bushmen specifically, because I had become daily more superstitious about too direct an approach in so indirect a world.
‘Sometimes, perhaps two, perhaps three,’ he said, gravely dubious, knowing what I meant.
‘Where do you think would be the best shade to rest for a while then, and perhaps find a buck or two to shoot before we go home?’ I went on, pressing him no further.
At that a look of new life came into his eyes and a low laugh broke from him. He jumped into the water, swung the makorro round so fast without warning that Long-axe was nearly thrown off his balance, climbed quickly in and raced across to the north where a long slope of yellow winter grass went slowly up from green reeds to clumps of dense black high wood. So slight were all gradients in the swamp that we had to disembark a hundred yards from the edge of the lagoon and wade ankle-deep ashore, leaving the makorros caught in the reeds. Instinctively no one spoke but conveyed their meaning by signs. The water was so hot it almost burned my cooler ankles and at the first touch of the fiery island earth I put on my boots. How still the island was! And yet I had an odd feeling that some kind of vibration was running there through the shining air, as if somewhere within these black woods a powerful dynamo was running to charge the lonely place with electricity. My companions seemed aware of it too, for as I took my gun from Comfort to move off towards the clumps of wood, the paddlers, each with a long throwing spear in hand, began hotly disputing with one another as to who should lead the way.
‘What’s the matter?’ I whispered to Comfort.
‘They’re afraid of buffalo, Moren,’ he said. ‘No one likes being in the lead when there might be buffalo about.’
Tired of the dispute, Long-axe turned his broad shoulders disdainfully on the others and, with a superb look of scorn on his broad, open young face, walked to the front. But I held him back and called the guide.
‘This is your place,’ I commanded him in a whisper. ‘You are the guide. You go ahead and I’ll follow immediately behind you.’
He looked as if he would still demur but he was at heart a fair person and the justice, as much as the note of command, compelled him. Perhaps I should have paused a moment then to let the turmoil of the dispute subside within him. However, I let him walk straight on, his long spear in hand, but not looking about him as attentively as he should have done. I followed, with Comfort next and the paddlers in single file behind him.
We walked thus for about a quarter of a mile. All the while I felt increasingly uneasy and aware of the odd vibration and crackle of electricity charging the shining element of the high noonday air. Carefully as I looked around me I saw no fresh spoor of any kind, and I am certain none of the others did or they would have warned me. None the less because of my growing uneasiness I was about to halt our small procession, when it happened.
We were in a round, hollow depression up to our chins in yellow grass and approaching the centre of the island. All around us were dense copses of black trees sealed with shadow and invariably wearing a feather of palm in their peaked caps. Suddenly the guide slapped his neck loudly with the flat of his hand. I myself felt the unmistakable stab of a tsetse fly on my own neck and thought: ‘If there’s fly here, buffalo can’t be far away.’
At that precise moment the copses all around us burst apart and buffalo, who had been within, sleeping, came hurtling through their crackling sides with arched necks, thundering hooves, and flying tails, all with the ease and speed of massed acrobats breaking hoops of paper to tumble into the arena for the finale of some great circus.
The guide dropped his spear, instantly fell flat on his stomach and wriggled away into the grass. So did the paddlers. Comfort stood his ground only long enough to call out to me hoarsely: ‘Master, throw your gun away. Let’s crawl on our hands and knees and pretend to be animals nibbling the grass. It’s our only chance.’
However, I stood my ground because, in some strange way, now that my uneasiness was explained I was not afraid. Perhaps I knew, too, it would be useless to run. But whatever the reason, I remember only a kind of exultation at witnessing so truly wild and privileged a sight. Automatically I slammed a cartridge into the breech of my gun and held it ready on my arm while the copses all round me went on exploding and the ground began to shake and tremble under my feet. For one minute it looked as if some buffalo, coming up from behind me, were going to run me down. But at the last minute they divided and passed not ten yards on either side of me. From all points and at every moment, their number was added to until the yellow grass and the glade far beyond ran black with buffalo, as if a bottle of indian ink had been spilt over it. They took to the channel ahead in a solid black lump, like a ship being launched, throwing up a mighty splash of white water over the reeds before they vanished round a curve of the main wood. I thought with strange regret, ‘They have gone’, and stood turning over in my exalted senses the tumultuous impression of their black hooves slinging clay at the blue; bowed Mithraic heads and purple horns cleaving grass and reeds and spray of thorn like the prows of dark ships of the Odyssey on the sea of a long Homeric summer; deep eyes so intent with the inner vision driving them that they went by me unseeingly.
Suddenly there was another crackle of paper wood behind me. A smaller copse burst open and the greatest bull I have ever seen came charging straight at me.
The paddlers and Comfort, who were all miraculously reappearing, formed a kind of Greek chorus round me, shouting over and over again: ‘Shoot, Master! Shoot, Father! Shoot, Chief of Chiefs! It’s the lone one! It’s the lone bull!’
Yet again I held my fire, though for a different reason, and such a fantastic one that I must apologize for it in advance. When my paddlers shouted ‘Shoot!’ I knew they were right. Here, even if safety did not seem to command it, was a chance to ensure our supply of food for days to come. But all my life I have dreamed about one particular buffalo. Much as I love the lion, elephant, kudu, and eland, the animal closest to the earth and with most of the quintessence of Africa in its being is for me the buffalo of the serene marble brow. Ever since I have been a small boy I have dreamed of one particular buffalo above all buffaloes. I will not enlarge on all the fantastic situations in which my dreaming mind has encountered him, and the great and little-known stretches of the continent in which my eyes have, for years, sought him with a growing hunger. All that matters is that unless absolutely forced to, I could not shoot on this occasion because here, at last, was the buffalo of my dreams. He took shape as a lone bull charging at me, the purple noon-day light billowing like silk around him. He came straight at me, so close that at last, reluctantly, I was about to put my gun to my shoulder and shoot.
For the second time my companions vanished. Then the buffalo abruptly swerved aside, and charged by me so close that his smell, the lost smell of the devout animal age before man, went acid in my nose.
I stood there watching him vanish like a man seeing his manhood in the field die down before him, thinking: ‘Only one thing saved me. I was not afraid. Because of that I belonged to them and the overall purpose of the day. In their magnetic deeps they knew it. But afraid, no gun or friend on earth could have saved me.’
I came to, trembling all over with the fear of what would have happened if I had been afraid, to hear the guide, sufficiently relieved to find himself alive to be mockingly reproachful of me, saying: ‘There was meat there you know, Master, for many days.’ His voice sounded as if he were far away and not rising out of the grass near me. I gave no answer but walked over to where the others were uttering cries of astonishment over the spoor of the lone bull.
‘Look!’ Comfort exclaimed, pointing to the puncture in the clay behind each of the rear hoof-prints. ‘Look how deep his after-claws have pierced the clay!’
The buffalo, once he has stunned his enemies with head and horn, likes to give them the coup de grâce with the pointed dagger he carries in a leather sheath at the heels of his hind legs. But none of us had ever seen after-claws so long as these.
‘Auck!’ Long-axe said, shaking his head and his voice gentle as a woman’s with wonder. ‘He must be the Chief of their Chiefs!’
But Samutchoso was looking more at me, not the spoor. In the same tone of awe that he had used the evening before when I shot the lechwe, he said quietly, certain of his meaning: ‘He knew you, Master. He recognized you and knowing you turned aside.’
After that we tried to rest in the nearest shadows but the shade-loving tsetse fly soon drove us out to seek relief in the hot sun. I made no attempt to hunt because I was certain the alarm raised by the buffalo would have stampeded the game for many miles around. In fact we were hardly back in the open when a baboon, now thoroughly on the alert, spotted us and broadcast a loud warning to the bush below him. Instead we did a complete circuit of the island to look for signs of human occupation. We found none except, well above flood-water level, the remains of three ancient makorros, unlike our paddlers’ of flat-bottomed design, slowly rotted and rotting in the grass.
‘Massarwa! Bushmen!’ Samutchoso, who seemed more aware of my main purpose than the others, explained unbidden as he came to stand sharing my absorption beside me.
All this time I noticed that the nerves of my companions had been sorely tried by the encounter with the buffalo. Whenever a baboon frantically rattled a palm in the silence, or a foraging party of indefatigable termites dropped a dry limb from a dead tree to crash in the bush below, they started violently and appeared ready to run. They followed me into the dark main wood with reluctance, and sought the daylight beyond with the eagerness of a vivid apprehension. Their relief when we rounded the circle where we had left the makorros among the motionless rushes, and started back for camp, made them chant with joy as they bent down to take up their paddles. However, I lay on my back in the bottom of the craft, looking deeply up into the blue channel of the sky framed between the trembling reed tips above me, with my heart and mind still so much in the scene with the buffalo that I had no room even for the negative answer implicit in the rotting Bushman dug-outs on the island. I felt that the encounter had for a moment made me immediate, and had, all too briefly, closed a dark time-gap in myself. With our twentieth-century selves we have forgotten the importance of being truly and openly primitive. We have forgotten the art of our legitimate beginnings. We no longer know how to close the gap between the far past and the immediate present in ourselves. We need primitive nature, the First Man in ourselves, it seems, as the lungs need air and the body food and water; yet we can only achieve it by a slinking often shameful, back-door entrance. I thought finally that of all the nostalgias that haunt the human heart the greatest of them all, for me, is an everlasting longing to bring what is youngest home to what is oldest, in us all.
I was lifted out of this mood by the sight of an aeroplane coming down the centre of the blue channel above me like a translucent insect about to be burned in the yellow lamp of the sun. I was told, by the pilot later that it was full of primitive black people on their way from Muhembo to the distant gold mines. Far down on the swamp we moved in the slow, ancient way. But above, with the blazing afternoon water hurling long spears of copper and bronze light at their eyes, the black travellers sang incessantly, for reassurance, the one hymn, ‘Abide with me’, which the missionary priests, the medicine men of the peoples who built the magic plane, had taught them. They sang it so loudly that the pilot heard it above the noise in his cockpit. But from where I lay I heard only the engines droning discordantly among sounds dedicated to a world before and beyond us all.
So we came home in the evening, the smoke of our camp-fires blue among the lofty tree-tops. Since morning two vultures had taken up their position on the summits of two of the highest of them. They were starkly outlined against the red of the sunset and made an ominous impression. The moment we walked into the camp I knew it was more than an impression. Coming back content and still somewhat exalted by all that had happened in a long and exacting day, I did not know at first what had happened. The paddlers, with few exceptions, were huddled round their fires cooking the remains of my lechwe and when they saw we brought no meat looked up to give us no greeting but only a long sullen stare. Both Charles and Spode were already in bed under their mosquito nets, and Ben and Vyan, coming to greet me, looked very tired and thoroughly downhearted.
We’ve been all over the country,’ Vyan said wearily, ‘and found nothing to shoot at. The paddlers are pretty fed-up and poor old Charles has had to go to bed with a bad attack of lumbago.’
‘And he?’ I asked, pointing to Spode’s net.
‘Oh! He, poor fellow,’ answered Ben, who slept near him, ‘says he was kept awake all night by wild beasts prowling round his bed and went to rest soon after we returned to camp this morning.’
I went to once to doctor Charles, who was lying uncomplaining but in great pain from an affliction he had not had before. I then woke Spode and persuaded him to join the others for an evening drink inside a large mosquito net, fifteen feet long, twelve feet wide, and twelve feet high that I had designed for just such an occasion. We sat there safe from mosquito attack and soon the drink, the smell of Jeremiah’s dinner on the fire, and our exchanges of the day’s news brought into being a mellow objectivity. After Spode’s first laugh I went out to hold my nightly sick parade among the paddlers. Samutchoso and the rest of my party appeared to be remonstrating with unusual vehemence with those who had stayed at home. However, when they saw me they fell silent and began, half-embarrassed, to come forward with their slight ailments.
When I had finished I thought the atmosphere seemed lighter, and Karuso felt free to ask: ‘Please get us more meat. We’re not getting enough food.’
‘First thing in the morning,’ I promised him, and walked back to our communal net white in the darkness.
Tired, we all crept into our nets immediately after eating, and whenever I woke I heard the hippo-bull of the night before stamping and huffing and puffing with rising resentment around our beds. Once when he sounded almost on top of me I flashed my torch in his direction. The moon was rising. Though reeds and trees were too dense to reveal his shape, his eyes showed up long, slanted, and emerald green. Towards morning he seemed to accept us and withdrew to the moonlit waters with resignation. Thereafter, I believe, he learnt even to enjoy our company and the change in routine that our presence provided. He visited us nightly, announcing his arrival with a loud crash through the wing of reeds, a fat boy trying to make our flesh creep with fierce puffs of breath. For a while he would study us from all angles and then return, full of simple wonder, to his soft water, where he made solemn and reverential noises at the moon. Because he appeared alone, and celibate, and was full of devout utterance I called him Augustine, after one of my favourite saints, who I am certain would have been the first to understand since he, too, had been a bishop of Hippo. Unfortunately Spode found no joy in our hippo. He kept Spode awake for hours and in all his larded innocence added greatly to our problems.
At first light, when I took my companions their coffee with the intention of asking Vyan and Ben to go out hunting before breakfast, I found Vyan with his feet so afflicted by protracted immersion in the swamp waters that I could not think of suggesting it to him. Ben, too, looked out of his net with a flushed face, a hand shaking with fever, and a look of tightly withheld suffering on his sun-lined face. He had a high temperature and told me he had been bitten by a poisonous spider that had crept between his blankets. It lay in the earth beside his bed so crushed that it was not recognizable, but its bite clearly was dangerous. I had antidotes effective for any snake or serpent bite but knew of nothing for this kind of spider. I could only insist on his keeping quiet and drugging his pain. Charles was paralysed in the grip of lumbago. That left only Spode and me among the Europeans, and Spode arose sombre with another enigmatic variation of humour. With so much suffering around, his mood did not strike me as a gratuitous complication and for the last time I insisted on his carrying out the programme we had agreed upon. I gave the paddlers for breakfast such meat as we had left, hurried through our own so as not to miss the light for filming and, with Comfort to help me, I acted as assistant to Spode while he made some individual studies of the paddlers in camp. That was soon over. Then I asked Spode to accompany me with his camera for the rest of the day.
‘What for?’ he asked.
‘For whatever we can find,’ I told him. ‘You would have had some wonderful stuff to film if you’d been with me yesterday.’
He looked hard at me for a long moment and said: ‘I have not the strength. I’m not well. My back is troubling me.’
The day was riding high, wide and handsome into the deeps of the incredible blue sky. I could not argue with Spode to any good effect before the brittle company watching us so keenly; nor indeed could I force him to work when he felt he could not. Above all, I had no time to waste if I were to find food for the forty odd mouths I had to feed before the horseman of the day rode sagging on his scarlet blanket into his black stable in the west. So I just left Spode, the camp, and all in it to the greathearted Vyan, and with the proved company of the day before took to the main stream. One extra makorro and crew of two brought up the rear. Vyan, apologetic to the last, stood on the island bank watching us out of sight.
This time we struck out up-stream. We travelled in the shelter of the papyrus on the far side of the stream for some miles until we came to a channel between two green cliffs. We turned into it and crept along it for about half a mile to emerge into a big and lovely lagoon. It was blue with light and Chinese with reeds and clumps of wild bamboo. Straight ahead of us rose a gentle yellow island mound with a great, glittering lechwe male surrounded by seven does coming like a dream of Joseph out of Pentateuch water. They were as yet totally unaware of our presence. Our guide motioned the other two makorros back into the reeds. In order to make his craft lighter he signalled to Long-axe to transfer himself to them and then with one long sweep of his paddle he took the two of us, alone, into a jungle of tall sedges at the side. There he put his paddles away, lay down in the prow with his chin over the edge and with his hands began to pull us by the shorter reeds foot by foot, slowly towards the lechwe. He did it so well and patiently that a mauve heron came floating low over my head without even looking down at us.
Once, when he paused to rest, the sweat running like water between his shoulders, I looked over the side and saw we were going down a line of baby crocodiles all drawn up, a yard apart, lips curling over white teeth at the corners, just below the surface of the still water. I tapped his shoulder to warn him, for they were old enough to bite off his fingers. He grinned endearingly and pointed at the opposite bank where another row of white-toothed infants was facing us. It all looked very official, as if we were witnessing a dress rehearsal for some trooping of crocodile colours.
I don’t know how long our journey lasted, but when finally the guide motioned me to shoot and I rose carefully to my full height in the unstable craft to look over the tops of the sedges, the lechwe and his brilliant women were standing half way up the slope of the island staring hard at the place where we had first broken into the lagoon. I shot quickly and he dropped where he stood. That was one anxiety resolved. We handed over the lechwe to the crew of the extra makorro to take back to camp, and then prepared to search the backwaters to the north of the main stream for signs of people.
As I stood there once more at one with myself, my surroundings, and my companions, I saw a new column of smoke rising purple in the midst of the papyrus approximately, I judged, at the place where I thought I had seen the young woman’s face in the grass. Comfort confirmed my reckoning and when I teased him, saying, ‘D’you think that smoke is perhaps just another play of water and shadow over the reeds?’ he laughed though he said nothing.
‘Well,’ I went on, ‘we’ll go and have a closer look at that particular smoke the first clear day we get!’
His reply was prevented by the flutter of a bird which appeared on the branch of a tree on the crown of the island, crying: ‘Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick!’
They all wanted me to accept the bird’s invitation at once. However, I refused, explaining carefully that I wanted to come back and film the whole honey-bird episode. Comfort, self-disciplined as ever, set the obedient example with grace. Only he could not resist whispering to me, in English, that in his view it was futile to wait, because ‘the foreign master’ (as he called Spode) would never come. Not as pessimistic, or as clear-sighted, perhaps, in this regard as Comfort, I took the reappearance of the little bird as a good omen and went on happily to search island after island in the swamp.
Again we found no signs of recent occupation by human beings, only some more antique makorros rotting in the sun and damp. That, of course, was disappointing, and yet as the day opened out like a coral sea before us I felt increasingly uplifted by the tranquil lagoons filled and overflowing with light; and the islands, contemplative with trees and graced with palms, which succeeded one another so regularly that they still dangle like a necklace of diamonds and emeralds on a thread of gold in my memory. Each one of them seemed to have its own privileged view of intimate life of bird, reptile, and animal life to deploy for us. For instance, about midday when a wind rose to blow rose-pink through the silver air and tore the sound of our feet, like dead leaves, away over the waters behind us, we arrived at a green island meadow sunk in a round shelter of high woods. There, as still as if they were stitched petit point by point into olive-green tapestry, lay an apricot lechwe male with a harem of five all fast asleep around him. I watched them, barely thirty yards away, for twenty minutes as they continued to breathe deeply without opening an eye behind their long black lashes. My companions begged me to shoot but I couldn’t do it. As we already had our daily food, I felt it would be a betrayal of natural trust and such treachery to the deep feeling of at-oneness that had grown in me since leaving camp that I feared some terrible retribution would follow the superfluous deed. So I led my companions carefully away like someone withdrawing from the bedroom of a beloved sleeper he did not wish to wake. The last I saw of the male was his long lips ceaselessly moving as if some dream had brought him to the pastures reserved only for his translation and his gods. Also I cannot stress sufficiently what a growing relief it was not to be solicited by the noise, and importuned by the colour, of my own metropolitan time. Our senses were totally immersed in sounds and colours that had nothing to do with man. I can only say that I found a new freedom for my senses in the swamp that day, so concrete, for all its imponderable expression, that it was as if a great physical burden had been lifted from me. That freedom had a voice of its own, too, for we all spoke instinctively in tones that we did not normally use and which came from us as naturally as the sound of the wind from the trees.
So it went on until we were all resting, not in the shadows of the tsetse-fly ridden copse, but well away in the shade of a lone quiver-full of palms. Samutchoso was carefully rolling up the discarded skin of a chrome yellow cobra we had found, hung out like some dandy’s washed cummerbund to dry on a screen of white thorns. The guide, I had noticed, when he found it had instantly handed it over to Samutchoso as though it were his right.
Suddenly Samutchoso looked up intently at me and said: ‘You know, Master, you won’t find many Bushmen here!’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
He explained at length that the tsetse fly had become so bad in the swamp that, even in his lifetime, it had forced his own people to withdraw from parts of the swamp they had occupied and cultivated before the Matabele first drove them out of the north. The Bushmen had either done likewise, or had died of sleeping sickness in the swamp.
When I asked where the surviving Bushmen had gone, he motioned vaguely with his hands, but stressed again that very many had died. Then he paused for quite a while weighing some issue carefully in his mind before he announced that he knew a place where Bushmen annually met. No! he could not say whether they were River Bushmen or not, only that they were true ‘naked Bushmen’ and that the place was not in the swamp.
Where was it? I asked eagerly.
Pleased with the startling effect of his announcement, he paused dramatically, but then it all came out in spate, though as he spoke his voice was like stealthy footfall for awe of what he said. Some days’ journey from the place where he lived in the swamp, he informed me, straight out into the desert, there were some solitary hills. The Bushman called them the Tsodilo Hills – the Slippery Hills, and they were the home of very old and very great spirits. He had heard that European huts were divided into many rooms, and so, he would have me know, was the interior of the Slippery Hills. In each compartment dwelt the master spirit of each animal, bird, insect, and plant that had ever been created. At night the spirits left their rooms in the hills to do their business among the creatures made after their fashion, and the spoor, the hoof-marks left by their nocturnal traffic, could be seen distinct and deep in the rocks of the Slippery Hills. In a place in the central hill lived the master spirit of all the spirits. There below it was a deep pool of water that never dried up. Beside the pool grew a tree with the fruit of knowledge on it, and hard by the tree was the rock on which the greatest spirit of all had knelt to pray the day he made the world. The dent in the rock where his vessel with sacred water had stood so that he could rinse his mouth and hands before prayer, and the marks made by his knees as he knelt to pray over his creation, could be seen to this day. All around on the smooth rock surfaces there were paintings of the animals the great spirit had made, and in all the deepest crevices lived swarms of bees that drank at the pool of everlasting water and tumbled the desert flowers to make the sweetest of honey for the spirits. There, he said, among these hills, once a year, for a short season, the Bushmen gathered.
Deeply impressed by the manner as much as the substance of what he told me, I asked how he knew all this.
He replied: ‘I have been there, Master. I have seen it all with these old eyes of mine.’
‘But how did you get there? Why did you go?’ I pressed him.
‘I went many years ago, Master,’ he answered with great solemnity, ‘because my own spirit was weak and weakening and I needed help to strengthen it if it were not to die. I went to those hills to ask for help and I saw all the things I have told you of, and I was helped.’
Suddenly I began to understand and wondered why I had not done so before. First, there had been that glimpse of special authority the day I hired the paddlers at Ikwagga. And now this latest incident of the discarded cobra skin which I should have remembered was one of the great medicines and symbol of eternal renewal in Africa.
‘So you –’ I began.
For the first time he interrupted to say soberly: ‘Yes, Master, I am a prophet and a healer.’
However unlikely and superstitious it may sound in civilized surroundings, there on a far island in the unpredictable swamp, as the wheel of the day’s light, spokes flashing with the angle of the turn, went over the hump of blue to roll down towards the night, I was not inclined to be critical. Besides, I have always had a profound respect for aboriginal superstition not as formulations of literal truth, but as a way of keeping the human spirit obedient to aspects of reality that are beyond rational articulation. Even Samutchoso’s name: ‘He that was left after reaping’, took on an added meaning.
I put my hand on his stained old shoulder and asked: ‘Would you take me to these hills when we have done with all this?’
He looked long at me while all the others stopped talking, before he answered steadily: ‘Yes, Master! I will take you, but on two conditions. There must be no dissention as there is now among those who come with you. You must compose your differences with one another before we set out, otherwise disaster will come. And there must be no shooting or killing of any kind on the way to the hills. No shooting, even for food, until the spirits have given permission for it. It is a law of the spirits that none must come into the hills with blood on his hand, or resentment in his heart. Even if a fly or a bee should annoy you, you must not kill it. . . . I know of a Herero cattleman who went there with his herd in the rainy season. On the way he killed a lion which attacked a cow and that night the master spirit of the lions came from the hills and devoured him and his herd. . . . If you can promise me all that, Master, I’ll take you to the hills, for I too feel a need to go back there again.’
‘Of course I’ll promise,’ I said sincerely, not remembering that the words ‘Of course’ can be unduly provocative in a country still so truly of its own dark fate as is Africa.
I returned to camp with Samutchoso’s story in the forefront of my mind. I was eager to tell the others such hopeful news, but the taste for it was soon driven from my tongue. Somehow when I saw from afar three instead of two vultures outlined in the evening sky above the camp, I knew I was not going to have a chance. On arrival I found Ben was still far from well and Charles in great pain. Spode, after sweating under his blankets in the heat of the day, was only just up and not yet prepared to speak to anyone. The paddlers, with meat enough on their fires, perversely had found something new to disturb their brittle spirit. Someone had started a rumour that the launch was not coming back for us and that they would have to run the gauntlet of hippo and crocodile for two hundred miles on the main stream in their vulnerable makorros with a cargo of broken-down white people.
Comfort and I on my medicinal rounds mocked them out of that particular rumour and, as the night before, the return of Samutchoso and the rest of my black hunting companions gave them something more constructive to think about. However, the odd thing was, I discovered later, that at sundown that very evening our launch did have a major engine breakdown 180 miles up-river!
‘The trouble, Master,’ Comfort said to me when we had calmed them, ‘is that Karuso is king on water, but not king on land.’ He then asked as if ashamed of doing so: ‘But what will you do if the launch does not come?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘I’ve a good plan I’ll talk over with you if it becomes necessary.’
I spoke with more confidence than I felt because the night before the same grim possibility had occurred to me and I had been unable to sleep. I had decided that should the launch not come I would shoot enough meat to dry and so provision the camp for a month. I would leave Vyan in charge with Comfort to help him and take only Long-axe, the guide, and one makorro with me. I had already been told by the guide that he knew a way across the swamp where, if I didn’t mind abandoning the makorro after a while and wading up to my neck in crocodile waters, he could in two days bring me out on dry land fifty miles below ‘The Place of the Eddies’.
I was certain I could walk the fifty miles to our Land-Rovers in little over a day, and so, within three days of leaving camp, I would be in a position to organize a rescue party for the rest. I thought it wiser, however, to say none of this to the others for already there was a very negative atmosphere over the camp. So at dinner I tried to talk with a lively unconcern to my companions. However the conversation soon dwindled to an exchange between myself and Vyan, who was, at that hour, always his steadfast best. We went early to bed and all night I was aware of Spode uneasy in his net, and continually switching on his torch to shine at the places where ‘Augustine’ was transported with fierce relish at the sight of our camp. Ben, too, was in great pain and twice I got up to give him medicine. Still, I hoped that by morning our prospects would look brighter to all.
I was wrong. The paddlers were back in the mood of the night before, the sick were still sick, and when I asked Spode to come filming with me he said his back was hurting him too much for work. I offered to doctor him, too, as best I could, but he said only rest could put it right. I had to repeat the pattern of the day before, leave Vyan in charge, concentrate first on meat for the camp and then on the purpose of my journey. Again my luck held. Before ten I had shot two superb buck: my first precaution in case the launch should not return. Neither was an easy shot and yet the animals dropped like stones in their tracks. I sent the extra makorro back to camp loaded to the water’s brim with meat.
Relieved that the morning’s housekeeping was so quickly done, I made for the new smoke uncurling over the place where I had had that tantalizing vision of a young woman’s face among the reeds. Half a mile short of the smoke we found an obscure breach in the papyrus dyke against the main stream. We explored it apprehensively because the guide thought it might lead us straight into a hippo ambush. However, five minutes later we broke out of it into a characteristic Okovango back-water. Only to the east of us lay a vast expanse of papyrus already burnt down to the water’s edge by the fire, running with the noise and flame of an overland train, straight into the world of green. Past the black, ash-covered waste of water ran a broad open channel, and at the far end of the channel was an island where smoke rose like a curl unwinding from a cigarette between a smoker’s fingers.
‘People! Master! People!’ our guide exclaimed when he saw it, so excited that he breathed like a diver coming up for air.
Before I could stop him he let out a wild exultant yell and waved his paddle in the air. As a result when we reached the island it was as quiet and deserted as a churchyard at midnight. The fire, however, was still smouldering and beyond it, tucked securely among the trees, were three substantial grass huts. The screens over their entrances were firmly held in place by bits of dead wood, but the grass was trodden down and littered with the waste-products of a prolonged occupation. The guide gave the huts only the briefest of glances before he ran off deeper into the island, calling out loudly in friendly tones in a tongue of his own.
‘They are not far away,’ Samutchoso said, squatting by the fire. ‘No men, only women and children.’
I did not ask how he could tell so much from so little but he was right. Half an hour later our guide reappeared leading two shy, almost frightened women by the hand, while behind came half a dozen children. They were dressed only in blankets of skin and wore no ornaments of any kind, and to my private disappointment neither of them owned the face I had seen above the water. It is true they had clear traces of Bushman blood, and some of the children with light yellow skins, high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, looked like pure models of their Bushman prototype. I had hardly time to make the women a present of tobacco and give the children a tin of old-fashioned ‘humbugs’, before the elder of the two disappeared into one of the huts to come back with a large heap of sun-dried Okovango bream which she thrust upon us with both hands and shining eyes. The men, they told us, had gone away some moons before to trade skins somewhere on the perimeter of the swamps for tobacco. They had no idea when they would return and meanwhile they manned the fishing traps and maintained themselves and their children alone and unarmed, without fear or complaint, in a world where I would not have liked to go without modern weapons. They had, they said, no neighbours and they knew of no Bushman communities. Since they could remember they had always been just themselves, their menfolk, and their dead parents. They followed us down to the water reluctant, now that their fears were at rest, to let us go.
I myself felt oddly cheated by such an end to our first encounter with human beings in the swamp. I had kept on looking over my shoulder for the true Bushman face I thought I had seen among the reeds. I did not realize how much I had counted on meeting it again, and was almost irritable with unbelief that now I had to leave without seeing it.
Then, at the last moment, a call clear and vibrant as a bell came from across the channel. The women and children all instantly replied and beckoned wildly with their hands, the youngest jumping up and down in excitement. A flat-bottomed makorro suddenly darted out of the reeds and made straight for us. In it, alone and naked to the waist, paddle in hand, came the young woman whose face I had first seen among the reeds. The makorro was loaded with tender shoots of all kinds, and the moment it grounded the children pounced on the cargo and began chewing white water roots like sugar-cane. A young woman of the purest classical Bushman colour and features stepped out and, paddle clasped to her firm breasts, looked with shy inquiry about her.
‘Please tell her’, I asked the guide, while Comfort’s dark eyes went white with amazement, ‘that I greet her and that I have seen her before.’
She turned her head sideways, smiled politely into her hand, and said almost inaudibly to the guide: ‘I see him and know him too.’
I would have liked to stay and question her but for the moment the reward of having proved the reality of the vision seemed more than enough. Also it was getting late. Thinking to come back with Spode to film this brave little group in their daily setting, I asked the guide to explain that we would return soon with real presents for them all. We said good-bye and when we vanished down the breach in the papyrus dyke we could still see the dark little group motionless where we had left them on the shining foreshore between fire and island lump.
‘You are not thinking of coming to film these people as well as the honey-bird?’ Comfort called out half-mockingly in English from behind me. He was teasing me out of kindness, but touched me so accurately on the raw that I barely held back the retort he did not deserve. It was well I succeeded, for in fact I never saw the people or their island again.
That night I worked harder than ever to put our island camp at ease. I never had over-promising material in the paddlers, but I did not seek the explanation there. I was convinced that the responsibility lay first with me, and then in our European midst. The paddlers, with the vulnerability of primitive people to a more conscious human atmosphere, were merely picking up all that was negative in our situation, namely the depression caused by the ailments inflicted on my white companions, and what I took to be Spode’s failure to play his own constructive and contracted role. Charles, Ben, and Vyan were all on the way to recovery, but the atmosphere round Spode was as disturbing as ever. Again he had lain inert under his blankets for much of that day. He did not speak unless spoken to, and his handsome face was so charged with resentment, hurt, and disapproval of such an unexplained and unfathomable kind, that it sent my own determined heart into my boots. What effect then must not his appearance and example have had on the primitive paddlers? I made one more supreme effort that evening, therefore, to talk and jolly Spode into something positive, only to wake up in the morning to find it had all been in vain. Indeed, from the start of that day everything seemed to go wrong.
Spode, when I talked to him about filming the group of women and the honey-bird, said irritably: ‘You don’t ever understand, Laurens! I haven’t the strength today. Je n’ai pas de force. . . . Perhaps tomorrow.’
Hard upon this Charles, whose nerves had been sorely tried by inactivity and pain, made his one and only scene with me because Vyan had used an enamel coffee mug as a shaving bowl! This was followed by Comfort drawing me aside and saying that the paddlers were more than ever convinced that the launch would not come for us. Further, the guide had warned him that a small group among them were saying that if that happened they would kill us at night, throw us to the crocodiles, and take themselves out of the swamp the easiest way.
‘Don’t believe such nonsense,’ I said shortly. ‘And I order you not to repeat one word of such rubbish to anyone else.’
‘Of course I do not believe it,’ he answered, laughing without conviction: ‘I tell you merely to show you what sort of people they are here. But there is one thing I do not like, Moren. At first when I was among them they always spoke in Sechuana. Now they always speak the swamp dialect so that I cannot understand what they are saying.’
I did not take Comfort’s report of the paddlers’ threat seriously. It was, I was convinced, only an extreme symptom of a general sense of frustration and negation in the island camp. None the less I took precautions. I decided to stay in camp myself all day and to keep with me the men with whom I had developed a bond during the past few days. Their presence I was certain would help to create a better atmosphere. For the rest I proposed to break up in smaller groups the men who had idled longest round the camp-fires. Nothing more disconcerts the mass mind, particularly the negative mass mind, than to see its numbers reduced and its cohesion attenuated. I picked six of the most divergent characters and sent them off hunting with spears and an old shot-gun. I asked Vyan and Charles also to take out parties, and gave Charles my gun. That done, I proposed to have a serious talk with Spode. But he had already gone back to bed and appeared asleep. Thinking I could leave that until he woke in the afternoon, I went and talked at some length to each of the men left in the camp. Spode was still asleep when I finished, and all chance of having a quiet hour with him to myself vanished when the parties of hunters started coming back in the early afternoon, all with the same total lack of success.
Up to that moment I had thought my plan was serving its purpose well, but I was disconcerted to see how quickly the camp became despondent again. As a result I went out once more in the evening with my gun and the proved makorro crews. My luck continued to hold and at sundown I managed to bring off another extremely difficult shot. By my native Boer standards I have never regarded myself as anything except an average shot. Yet that evening I was shooting in an inspired ‘Rider Haggard’ class and to this day the way I shot, the manner wherein I acquired the gun, and the full extent to which it served the imperative mood of that part of the journey, for me holds something supernatural. I still do not like to think of what our plight might have been had I not had that gun and shot with it as I did. For days it was the only positive force in our midst, and the decisive factor in our fortunes. I do not know what the paddlers might not have done had it not enabled me to feed them so well. I shot with it nine times and killed eight buck. I shot twice at the same target only to put a fatally wounded animal out of pain. Once I used Vyan’s shot-gun to kill, with unlikely duck-shot, a wart-hog, one of the toughest animals in Africa. Stranger still, I seemed the only person able to find game. All the others, black and white, failed though I kept them busy hunting as a matter of policy. Yet whenever I went out, even into areas just vacated by other disappointed hunters, I would find game enough and to spare. These factors in the sum of our sealed-off period in the swamp served to rally the random emotions on the fickle island. I knew without question that those who hunted with me, particularly Samutchoso, were overawed by my success, and when they held the gun their fingers curled reverently about it as if it were a living and magnetic object. And of course I, too, was endowed with something of the gun’s ‘magic’. The effect on my own spirit was considerable and gave me such confidence in belonging to the purpose of all around me that neither the intractable paddlers, nor my utter failure with Spode, could undermine it.
And so the long days went slowly by. Spode never filmed for us again and became more than ever silent. I never had my serious talk alone with him. I pressed him no more. I remembered all the hours which, at the end of the day, I had devoted to building a bridge between himself, myself, and the others, all the efforts I had made to amuse, interest, appease, and stimulate him into becoming an active member of the expedition. I realized that perhaps I’d done too much of it, and that to try and carry him beyond his natural limits had made me neglect other duties. I had given priority to his moods and taken the others, even the paddlers, somewhat for granted. I had talked to Spode and thought about him when Ben, Charles, and the paddlers could have done with more of my time and imagination. So now I left him alone to make his own terms with the trust that had been put in him, and to find his own unsolicited and natural level. What I had of spare time I now gave to the others. Henceforth I made a point of talking at some length to each person in the camp each day, and when it became clear to me, as it had long been clear to Comfort and the others, that Spode was not going to work on his own prompting, I sent the guide with a special party to the little group of women we had discovered with presents to barter for more of their delicate bream. I sent another party to contact the honey-diviner. They came back at evening with the dark combs the bird had enabled them to find in a disused termite mound. I myself, sadly, gave up all the exploring I loved so deeply and concentrated on keeping the camp fed and in hand.
On the first day on which we could expect the launch, I took the precaution of telling everyone that I was not expecting it for another four days. I gave them all sundry tasks to do for distraction, yet I found myself, towards evening, continually listening for the sound of a diesel engine coming down the scarlet channeL It did not come that day nor the next, and on the third the atmosphere in the island was at its most ominous. I had the greatest difficulty in dispatching the hunters. Everyone, even Spode, who for once did not stay in bed, wanted to hang about, on the look-out, by the water-front. If it had not been for Vyan and Ben smoking, talking, and imperturbably going about the tasks of the day, Comfort’s disciplined presence, my hunter companions, and Jeremiah tending his pots and pans as if he were truly at home, I would have felt utterly bleak. Jeremiah was, perhaps, the most impressive of all. Frequently I found him smiling to himself over his pots and pans, so often indeed that I had to ask him why he was always smiling.
‘I was thinking of my son, Master,’ he said with a laugh of sheer contentment. ‘He is a very, very clever boy.’
As the red sun sank close to the papyrus spikes standing rigidly between us and the west like green railings round a green park, the disconsolate watchers at the water-front began to drift back to their evening fires.
‘The launch won’t be here before tomorrow at the earliest,’ I mocked Comfort openly. To myself I thought: ‘If it’s not here in two days’ time, I’ll have to go out with the guide to see what’s wrong.’
Just then a great shout went up from the river bank. In a second the camp was empty. The pulse of the launch’s engine beat faintly though steadily in the evening air. I remained sitting underneath a tree upon which Comfort had carved my name some days before. A disgruntled paddler had asked him what he was doing, and with a cheerful laugh he’d replied: ‘Writing a history of the camp so that when we do not come back the people who come looking for us will know why!’
I looked up gratefully now to the tender blue sky far above the great branches, and noticed that the number of vultures since our arrival had increased to five. The unaccustomed sound of the launch approaching, however, had made them stir uneasily. On tip-toe, with ruffled feathers and long scraggy necks stretched out, they appeared amazed and cheated. Just then one of the older paddlers, whom before I had hardly noticed, left the others and came to stand shyly in front of me. He held out a walking stick carved out of yellow island wood and said: ‘Please, Master, I made this for you.’ I took it in both hands, humbled that someone in the midst of his own predicament had given thought also to me. Only at that moment did I realize what a strain the whole thing had been.
The next morning at dark we left our island. As I went round the camp for the last time to scatter sand on our dying fires, I thought Augustine’s exhortation in the reeds were hoarse with protest at our going. At dawn we passed through miles of burnt-out papyrus water, and I was amazed to see how confidently the shy Setatunga antelope of the inmost swamp walked across the parched surface. At one place Vyan shot a buck at the meatless ferryman’s request, and Samutchoso and Long-axe walked out on the pitted papyrus mat to get it in.
We caught up with the fire standing high in flame and smoke on the edge of the main channel. Opposite it burnt another, as fierce and ruthless. I would not have thought it possible that green, water-fed fuel could burn with such abandon. The heat in mid-stream was intense. The water at one point was churning like porridge with mice, rats, snakes, and reptiles cruising frantically backwards and forwards from bank to bank looking for shelter from the flames. Above the leaping heat the sky was flashing with the spark and glitter of a fire all its own. Crimson bee-eaters swiftly dived around the roaring conflagration to pick off the insects taking to the air for safety on wings of shining glass. We went slowly against the current through the narrow gateway of fire like beings leaving a legendary world after a fateful argosy. For a long time I stood high in my old position in the prow watching the tallest flames fade, until at last a thick curtain of smoke came down between the central swamp and ourselves.
We travelled until after midnight before resting. Then we set off again early the next morning to arrive at ‘The Place of the Eddies’ by evening. All the while Spode sat silent and apart. He spoke to no one and seemed incapable even of making his bed. I had to do it for him. He looked most unhappy and his grey eyes were filled with conflict. However, no sooner were we safe on firm, dry mainland than some power of decision returned to him. I was helping Jeremiah to get hot tea and food because everyone was tired and hungry, when Spode drew me aside.
‘I regret, Laurens,’ he said, ‘but I cannot go on. You must send me back to Europe. This life is too brutal – un peu trop brutale – for me.’
‘Of course you realize what a terrible hole this puts me in?’ I couldn’t help remarking.
‘Please! Please!’ he exclaimed at once, becoming deeply agitated. ‘Can’t you ever understand? Je n’ai pas de force . . . I cannot go on.’
‘All right, Eugene,’ I told him, realizing that the situation was beyond reasoning and persuasion, and wondering, as often before in the stillness of the night, what I could do to set it right for us. Spode might go, but I had to go on. Somehow, if I were not to break faith with the people who had trusted us and lose both them and myself thousands of pounds, I had to produce the film we had contracted to make. I would have to travel the odd thousand miles to the nearest railway, and from there search South Africa for someone to take Spode’s place. What was more, I would have to hurry, because neither Vyan nor Ben could stay on with me indefinitely. In all the weeks already on the way we had barely done any filming. We had not even found our main quarry. I realized, sick at heart, I would be more than lucky if I finished the film quite apart from carrying out my own personal mission. Now at the fag-end of that long day when the curtain of smoke came down on the journey into the swamp, failure, which had for so long been peering over my shoulder, seemed to stare me full in the face. For a start, the technical difficulties appeared insurmountable. Even supposing I found a cameraman to take on the work, Spode had been using the latest German film-cameras, and all the film had been wound on spools and in laboratories in Britain to fit these special cameras. My chances of finding someone with such a camera in South Africa seemed infinitesimal, but, unless I did, all the film would have to be re-wound painfully foot by foot, in some improvised darkness in the heat and dust and glare of a desert journey. Would that be possible? And even if it were, would I find a technician patient enough to endure it? The journey behind us was child’s play in comparison with what lay ahead. All this went through my mind in one brief moment as I faced the familiar tide of agitation in Spode and repeated: ‘All right, Eugene. I’ll go to Muhembo first thing in the morning and ask them to fly you out when next they have a plane for the mines. But I would be grateful if you’d leave your cameras behind. That would help a lot.’
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.